Patterns Of Lexis In Chinese And English Texts

Cohesion, as an important part of texture, has been largely explored by many scholars and applied in language teaching and learning-Halliday & Hasan(1976), Guy Cook(1989), Michael Hoey(1991), Hu Zhuanglin(1994), Zhu Yongsheng(2001) and Liao Qiuzhong(1992) etc. However, one of the categories of cohesion (e.g. lexical cohesion), has received relatively little attention, let alone its importance.Actually, lexical cohesion plays a decisive role in text organization. It is the crucial element for creating texture and contributes much to text construction. This paper, first, makes an attempt to compare lexical cohesion in English and Chinese using Hoey's theoretical framework and on the basis of Halliday & Hasan's model of text cohesion. The paper groups lexical cohesion into nine categories-simple lexical repetition, complex lexical repetition, simple mutual paraphrase, simple partial paraphrase, antonymous complex paraphrase, other complex paraphrase, substitution, co-reference and ellipsis and analyzes two Chinese and English texts, which seems to show that the two languages prefer different lexical cohesive devices. Then three English compositions written by Chinese students are collected for the writer to examine their use of patterns of lexis. The study shows that good writings use more complex repetitions just like the English text does, though not as many, than poor ones which tend to use more simple repetitions, like that found in the Chinese text. Sources of these problems have been explored with influence from Chinese and lack of knowledge of English lexical network considered being the two major factors.As a result of the current research, the writer concluded that Hoey's patterns of lexis also apply to Chinese texts and the idea of patterns of lexis contributes a great deal to the sound judgement of writing quality. The thesis suggests that when teaching vocabulary and writing, teachers should help students to establish a lexical network and increase their sensitivity to lexical cohesion.