A Contrastive Study Of Cohesion In English And Chinese

When linguistic study is carried out, analyses of sound, structure, words, clauses and sentences are far from enough. The reason is that one can never correctly understand or fully appreciate the overall meaning of a text unless the linguistic study goes beyond the word and sentence level to the text level. Hence since mid 1960s, more and more importance has been attached to the discourse analysis or text analysis. When making contrastive studies between English and Chinese, this paper focuses on the text analysis. Moreover, whenever linguists make contrastive studies between English and Chinese, the idea that English is of hypotaxis, making use of formal devices, such as lexical and grammatical devices to achieve cohesion, and Chinese is of parataxis, achieving cohesion with the help of logical relations between words and sentences, enjoys much popularity. However, some linguists and the author believe that both English and Chinese are hypotactic. It is only a matter of degree. What this paper is interested in just lies in the "degree": what is the difference between the formal cohesive devices of English and Chinese? Specifically speaking, according to Halliday-and Hasan (1976), there are five devices that help a text achieve cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Besides what has been mentioned above, there are other effective devices to help a text achieve cohesion, among which the most important is thematic and information structure. This paper attempts to make a contrastive description on the differences in these cohesive devices between English and Chinese texts respectively, trying to provide some enlightenment for the translators, learners and teachers of the two languages.