A Contrastive Study Of Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese Newspaper Reporting Texts

Cohesion is one of the most important concepts of text analysis. Halliday & Hasan's theory of cohesion(1976), the most representative accomplishment in this field, gives an elaborate and sufficient description of the English cohesive devices and has thus called forth a keen interest in the study of cohesion.It is noteworthy that in China most of the contrastive studies were conducted on texts in a broad sense, and there were few studies applying the theory of text analysis to a specific genre of language. Besides that, most previous contrastive studies on cohesive devices between English and Chinese are mainly based on the observation of literature works. The present research attempts to use newspaper reporting texts as the data, in the hope to help reveal as many similarities and differences between English and Chinese as possible.This thesis targets to make a detailed contrastive study of cohesive devices in Chinese and English newspaper reporting within the framework of Halliday's cohesion theory with the support of a collection of texts with same genre, same topic and similar length, drawn from the well-known People's Daily and Washington Post. To be specific,10 Chinese newspaper reporting texts are selected from People's Daily and 10 English ones from Washington Post. Meanwhile, there are 5368 words in the Chinese corpus and 4823 words in English corpus, which means the average length of each newspaper reporting texts is approximately 537 words and 482 words in Chinese and English respectively.Therefore, the applicability and practicality of Halliday's cohesion theory is further tested in this thesis by making a contrastive study of the data both quantitatively and qualitatively with the help of the commonly-used software SPSS to find out whether significant differences exist in cohesive devices between English and Chinese newspaper reporting. But before that, a FoxPro program is applied to locate those words used as cohesive devices to calculate their frequencies. Then the similarities and differences of the cohesive devices in Chinese and English are discussed in great detail while with greater emphases placed on the latter. It is found significant differences exist in nominal ellipsis, personal reference and demonstrative reference because of different language systems, culture and thinking patterns. Moreover, no substitution, verbal ellipsis, clausal ellipsis and superordinate/hyponym occurs in English and Chinese newspaper reporting.In the end, a keen insight is provided into the different cultural and social backgrounds in traditional Chinese and western society which have a great bearing to the specific characteristics of the cohesion in Chinese and English. Meanwhile, it is suggested that the findings be applied to provide implications for contrastive studies in English and Chinese.