A Contrastive Study Of Lexical Cohesion In English And Chinese Texts

Cohesion. as one of the most important component of texture, has aroused the interests of many scholars and linguists, who have been studying them and have tried to establish the relation between cohesion and coherence and their importance in the creation of a text. According to Halliday and Hasan, cohesion can be divided into two types:grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Lexical cohesion is achieved through vocabulary choice. Actually, lexical cohesion plays a decisive role in text organization. It is the crucial element for creating texture and contributes much to text coherence.So the current paper, adopting Hoey's (2000) framework, attempts to compare and contrast lexical cohesion in English and Chinese prose texts. On the basis of Hoey's model, lexical cohesion in this paper is divided into simple lexical cohesion, complex lexical cohesion, simple paraphrase, complex paraphrase, superordinate, hyponymic and co-reference repetition. In terms of this classification, three English prose texts and three Chinese prose texts are selected and they display similarities and differences in the use frequency of lexical cohesion devices. Findings of this paper suggest that simple repetition enjoys a higher use frequency in Chinese texts as opposed to other lexical cohesion devices, while the English texts show an obvious tendency towards the employment of more synonyms. Antonym is more frequently applied in English texts than in Chinese texts.This study will not only deepen our understanding of lexical cohesion phenomena in both English and Chinese texts, but also prove to be of certain value to English teaching and Chinese-English translation work.