A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Cohesive Devices In A Dream Of Red Mansions And Its English Version

Nowadays, the focus of linguistic study has been shifted from the level of sentence to text. Not satisfied with the analysis of single sentences, linguists began to study the relation of different sentences from the angle of meaning, thus the concept of cohesion appears. Among the various linguistic schools, M. A. K. Halliday makes the greatest contribution to the construction of cohesion theory. He holds that cohesion arises when the explanation of meaning of one linguistic item is dependent on another in the text. In Cohesion in English, he divides the cohesive devices in English into five categories, which include reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, lexical cohesion, and provides detailed explanation. Owing to its great explanatory power for cohesion, Halliday's theory has won widespread acceptance. In China, it is applied by scholars in researches of Chinese and makes some contribution.On the other hand, as an important method of understanding things, comparison has also provoked the interests of many linguists. LU emphasizes the significance of contrastive study for foreign language teaching in the fact that only by comparison can the differences as well as similarities of various languages be found out. On the level of textual comparison, those about the phenomenon of cohesion take vital position and scholars all over the world make their efforts in this aspect. Under the frame of Halliday's theory of cohesion, this paper chooses A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xueqin and its English version translated by Yang Xianyi and his wife Gladys Yang as the corpus for comparison. It probes into the features of the specific use as well as overall distribution of Chinese and English grammatical cohesive devices, which include reference, substitution and ellipsis, from both qualitative and quantitative approaches. As a conclusion, the grammatical cohesion in Chinese can basically be analyzed according to Halliday's theory, but its unique characteristics also lead to more flexible cohesive ways. As a hypotactic language, more cohesive devices tend to appear in English, especially explicit devices such as reference, while the paratactic featuremakes Chinese apply more implicit cohesive devices such as ellipsis.