| The publication of Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 symbolizes the birth of cohesion theory. Since then, Cohesion theory has drawn keen attention at home and abroad. Many scholars have done researches on cohesion from different perspectives and most of them have given their own opinions. It is an absolute certainty that the study of cohesion brings about positive effect on English learning and teaching.Based on Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory, with the aid of corpus, and relevant computer software. this thesis studies the cohesion in the intensive reading texts of NHCE (20 texts.13.925 words). The author makes a statistical analysis of the distribution of different types of grammatical cohesive devices (including reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction) employed in the texts of NHCE and analyzes the different types of grammatical cohesive devices with detailed illustrations. This thesis aims to provide a clear description of the grammatical cohesive devices employed in the texts of NHCE and to find out the regular patterns. First, on the whole, there employed grammatical cohesive devices very frequently---as many as 239.210 instances of grammatical cohesive items are identified per thousand words. The high percentage indicates that grammatical cohesive devices play a very important part in achieving cohesion in these texts. Secondly, there are significant differences in the occurrence frequencies of different types of grammatical cohesive devices. Reference is the most frequently used while substitution and ellipsis are relatively seldom identified in the chosen texts. The occurrence frequency of conjunction stands in between.The author hopes that the present research can be helpful for language learners to get better acquainted with the cohesion theory and its application, and thus instruct the teaching of English discourse effectively.
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