A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese

Grammatical cohesion plays a decisive role in text organization. It is the crucial element for creating texture and contributes much to text construction. Therefore this thesis makes an attempt to contrast grammatical cohesive devices in English and Chinese on the basis of Halliday & Hasan's theory and Zhu Yongsheng's study on this subject. In this thesis, the author takes the inductive way to make a statistics of the collected corpus, analyze the statistic result and give a reasonable explanation of it from the angles of culture, philosophy and linguistic logic. At last, the result of research is made use in translation. The thesis consists of five parts: The Introduction briefly introduces the position of grammatical cohesive devices in the field of cohesive study, the purposes and significance, the approach and the organization of the present thesis. As we know, there are two main sorts of comparison between texts, i.e. macro-comparison and micro-comparison. The latter includes non-structural and structural comparison. Cohesive devices studied in the thesis are non-structural. According to Halliday & Hasan's classification of cohesive devices, there are grammatical cohesive devices and lexical ones. The thesis mainly focuses on the former, which is realized through grammar. The author aims to find the similarities and differences of the grammatical cohesive devices, and then give reasonable explanations of them. This way the comparison study will provide some guidance for translation practice. Chapter Two is literature review in which the author reviews the relevant research of the field. Cohesion, as an important part of texture, has been largely explored and applied in language teaching and translation such as Halliday & Hasan(1976), Guy Cook (1989), Michael Hoey (1991), Hu Zhuanglin (1994), Liao Qiuzhong (1992), Zhu Yongsheng (2001). However, one of the categories of cohesion (e.g. grammatical cohesion), has received relatively little attention, let alone its importance. Based on the previous study, the author puts forward some research questions: (i) Whether there are corresponded grammatical cohesive devices in Chinese to those in English. (ii) How these grammatical cohesive devices differ from each other in English and Chinese. And what makes the similarities and differences in English and Chinese. (iii) How to rework grammatical cohesive devices in translation. Chapter Three presents the data used in the thesis and contrasts the grammatical cohesive devices in English and Chinese with the collected corpus. According to Xu Yulong, contrastive corpus should be typical, contemporary of the same style and similar topic. The author chooses eight passages of modern English and Chinese in three styles: literary style, scientific style and oral style. Grammatical cohesive devices are divided into four kinds: reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction, which are studied respectively through the statistics of their frequencies in the corpus. The statistic figures show that English is inclined to use reference and conjunction while Chinese gives preference to substitution and ellipsis. Chapter Four analyzes the statistics result and gives the explanation from the angles of culture, philosophy and linguistic logic and puts the study result into translation practice. Due to "general competence of human", these grammatical cohesive devices exist in both English and Chinese, and even the functions of them are the same in the two languages. The author gives more explanation of their differences, especially the difference in substitution of English and Chinese, which is also the focus of the study, and in which the study differs itself from the previous ones that all maintain that the frequency of substitution device in English is bigger than that in Chinese. But the statistic figures of this study show that the frequency of it in Chinese is bigger than that in English. As for this point, the author thinks that it's not only because of the relativity of " hypotaxis" and "parataxis" of language but...