Lexical Cohesion In Prepared English Speeches By Chinese College Students

Cohesion, as one of the most important components of the text, contributes much to the coherence of a text and has aroused the interests of many linguists and scholars ever since. In 1976, Halliday and Hasan published the famous book Cohesion in English, which made the word cohesion a widely accepted term in text linguistics. Cohesion can be divided into two categories-grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. The effect of lexical cohesion can be achieved by different lexical choices in discourse. It is the only type of cohesion that regularly forms multiple relationships and the dominant mode of creating texture. Lexical cohesion is considered as the most important one in various means. Therefore, many scholars have done significant researches on it. However, few of the studies focus on how lexical cohesion is used in the public English speech.The originated in ancient Greece and Roman. At that time, it mainly focused on politics and made a lot of achievements. With the development of society, the content of public speaking is broadened, and people's needs on public speaking are growing. Therefore, a number of public speaking contests participated by college students appeared, including "21st Century Cup", "CCTV Cup", etc. At present, it has been an indispensable part of people's living, and it attracts more and more linguists'attention. Their studies mainly concentrate on the variety of speech, structure, pattern, thematic progression and techniques etc. while studies from the perspective of lexical cohesion are scare. Therefore, the author attempts to study public speeches in terms of lexical cohesion in order to make up this deficiency.Based on three most influential taxonomies classified by Halliday & Hasan (1976), Hasan (1984) and Hoey (1991) respectively, a refined taxonomy of lexical cohesion is put forward, and 30 excellent public English speeches collected from sixth to fifteenth of 21st Century Cup National English Speaking Competition are analyzed from the perspective of lexical cohesion, in order to solve the following problems:(1) How different lexical cohesive devices are used in public speeches by college students? What's their distribution regulation?(2) What are the reasons underlying the distribution?In this paper, the author, through the sample of the champion's speech of the 10 of "21st Century Cup" National English Speaking Competition, firstly labeled different lexical cohesive devices and calculated their frequencies and percentages through the Microsoft Excel, and then analyzed how they contribute to the coherence of the discourse. Meanwhile, the author conducted the same analysis of the remaining 29 public speeches and enumerated many examples from the corpus to explain the application and function of different lexical cohesive devices. Then the distribution of all lexical cohesive devices was calculated in the whole corpus. At last, the author, combining lexical cohesion theory and the characteristics of public speech, analyzed the reasons underlying the distribution of lexical cohesion.The results of the study show that there is a regulation of lexical cohesion distribution in public speeches by college students, that is, repetition ranks the first, and the other lexical cohesive devices, including synonymy, text-bound relation, antonymy, general word and superordinate, number in a decreasing order respectively. This study makes people have a deep and clear idea of distribution of different lexical cohesive devices in public speeches. It contributes to the improvement of speech writers'composing level and listeners' understanding ability. At the same time, this research makes us realize the importance of lexical cohesion and teaches us how we should appropriately use lexical cohesion to make successful public speeches.