A Contrastive Study Of The Cohesive Device Application In English Public Speeches By Native And Non-native College Students

In recent years, academic attention on grammatical units on lexical or syntactic level has been gradually shifted to a bigger subject--text. As what Halliday and Hasan have mentioned in Cohesion in English, “A text has texture, and this is what distinguishes it from something that is not a text”(Halliday& Hasan, 1976:2). Thus, the vital question of how to achieve cohesion and coherence in a text, meaning to grant a text with texture, has become a focus in the area of discourse study.Also, as “the texture is provided by the cohesive RELATION that exists between them”(Halliday& Hasan, 1976:2), this thesis is going to adopt such cohesive relation, which has been defied and categorized later by Halliday and Hasan as the Five Cohesive Devices, including Reference, Substitution, Ellipsis, Conjunction and Lexical cohesion, as measurements to investigate the differences lying on the cohesive device application between Chinese and American college students and the cultural and linguistic causes that lead to such differences. Therefore, Taking 30 first place public speeches in renowned speech contexts held among Chinese and American college students as corpus, this thesis follows mainly two tracks to conduct its statistic and theoretic research. On the first track, it focuses on investigating the differences of cohesive device application between public speeches written by Chinese and American students in their own language(10 for each). While on the second track, it emphasizes the preference and features of cohesive device application adopted by Chinese students both in their Chinese and English speeches.The major findings of the study are: 1) When writing in their native language, Chinese students usually adopt less cohesive devices than American students. And Chinese students tend to adopt cohesive devices like Ellipsis and Repetition; while American students tend to use Substitution and Conjunction. 2) When writing in English, Chinese students tend to use far less cohesive devices than their counterparts. And comparing to American students, their frequency of Repetition and Ellipsis application is detected to be much higher and Conjunction and Substitution much lower. 3) The one that shall be held account for above differences is found to be Negative Language Transfer both culturally and linguistically.Based on the research, this thesis has proved its pedagogical value by provided several pieces of advice for English teachers or learners in their future public speech writing or general English writing.