| As one of the most important cohesive mechanisms for the actualization of textual coherence, lexical cohesion has recently become a heated discussion in the field of applied linguistics and text linguistics. Halliday & Hasan define it as the cohesive relationship achieved by the selection of vocabulary, which is realized by certain cohesive devices and cohesive ties (Halliday & Hasan, 1976:275 ) . The earliest study dealing with lexical cohesion can be traced back to Halliday (1962), who, for the first time, introduces the notion of cohesion and attempts to root cohesion in the framework of semantics. In his model, two general categories of cohesion are defined: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Halliday and Hasan, in their book Cohesion in English (1976), develop lexical cohesion to the perspective of texture. According to their categorization (1976, 1985), lexical cohesion is composed of reiteration, synonymy, hyponymy and collocation, etc. From then on, with the development of functional linguistics and text linguistics, large quantities of remarkable achievements have been made, and studies of lexical cohesion have been in multi-level patterns, among which Hoey (1991)'s model is influential. Hoey groups lexical cohesion into ten categories — simple lexical repetition, complex lexical repetition, simple mutual paraphrase, simple partial paraphrase, antonymous complex paraphrase, other complex paraphrase, substitution, co-reference, ellipsis and deixis. Since 1990s, the emphasis on the research of lexical cohesion has been gradually shifted from theoretical exploration to genre-based practical analysis and to contrastive studies across languages. However, in the literature, vast majority of the research is based on Halliday & Hasan's framework, and little research has been found to examine Hoey's model.Methodologically, Hoey's category is more creative than Halliday and Hasan'sin that it presents a new method of analysis for dealing with lexical cohesion and investigating lexical cohesion between sentences. Theoretically, his detailed analysis of the way lexical cohesion operates in text stresses the importance of lexical cohesion among the other types of cohesion. Practically, Hoey's matrix-oriented approach with its attendant categories would accurately reflect their non-linear complexity and, at the same time, provide us with an even more convenient model to the investigation and interpretation of lexical cohesion patterns. Moreover, Hoey has further limited the occurrence of ambiguity by establishing a hierarchy of importance among his categories. Halliday and Hasan, for whatever reason, never do this.Using Halliday & Hasan (1976)'s theory of text cohesion and coherence as the back-up and based on Hoey (1991)'s model for our analysis, the present thesis takes the genre of dissertation abstracts in the discipline of applied linguistics as the subject of our study. 15 abstracts are randomly selected as NS samples and NNS samples respectively. The study attempts to examine the similarities and differences on lexical cohesion patterns between native speaker of English (NS) and non-native speaker of English (NNS) dissertation abstracts and to account for their similarities and especially for their differences. Due to the fact that little relevant comparative research concerning the genre of dissertation abstracts is found in the current literature and even less research found by employing Hoey's model to look into lexical cohesion as far as we know, the present research is researchable and significant.The result shows: (1) there is no statistically significant difference between the two groups' use of simple lexical repetition, simple partial paraphrase, antonymous complex paraphrase and other complex paraphrase; (2) there is a statistically significant difference between the two groups' use of complex lexical repetition...
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