Context Of Co-text And Cohesion

The founder of Systemic Functional Grammar (abbr. SFG), M. A. K. Hallidaystates very clearly in his An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2001: F41) that"The aim has been to construct a grammar for purposes of text analysis". As a matterof fact, SFG has been extensively applied to the analysis of texts of different types.However, in the literature to date, there have been few studies focusing on thecontrastive analysis of a Chinese serial novel and its English translation at home andabroad. Any contrastive study of languages cannot be made as effective as it should beunless it takes as its guiding support a certain linguistic theory (Zhu Yongsheng et al.,2001:10). Thus, this thesis attempts to make a contrastive study of COHESIONbetween the Chinese serial novel A Dream of Red Mansions (the source language text)written by Cao Xueqin & Gao E and its English version (the target language text)translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang from the perspective of CONTEXT OFCO-TEXT in SFG. In the paper, the applicability and practicability of SFG tocontrastive text analysis of Chinese and English are further tested so as to provide anew perspective and a new approach for contrastive studies of novels. The paper alsoprobes into the similarities and differences between Chinese and English cohesivedevices, but with greater emphasis placed on the differences. It is hoped that thefindings of this study will provide a keen insight into translation practice and help thereader get a better understanding of context of co-text, the three strata of context aswell as cohesion theories.This thesis consists of six parts including Introduction and Conclusion. Theintroduction presents context theory and the relation of context of co-text to cohesionand points out that the present study is an attempt to study cohesion contrastivelybetween A Dream of Red Mansions and its English version from the angle of contextof co-text.Chapter one is literature review, including a review of the SFG approach tocontext, cohesion, contrastive text linguistics, and a brief comment on the significanceof this thesis.Chapter two is theoretical support. To begin with, the SFG definition anddescription of context especially context of co-text from three different perspectives,namely stratification, multi-functionality and meaning potentiality, are introduced indetail. Following that, cohesion theory is discussed, including its definition andclassification, its relation to texture and the position of contrastive study of cohesionin contrastive text linguistics. And then, we present contrastive text linguistics and itsrelation to cohesion, and its significance and classification. The focus of this chapteris on presenting context of co-text, cohesion and their relationship. In the stratifiedmodel of context in SFG, context of co-text, which lies at the lowest level, serves toembody the properties and organizations of the contextual variables of both context ofsituation (Level 1) and context of culture (Level 2) in terms of text. It is the linguisticenvironment of a text which embodies meaning potentials in terms of language and isof crucial importance to deciding whether or not a text is a unified and coherentsemantic unit. In other words, context of co-text determines the texture of a text(Halliday & Hasan, 1976/2001). In Halliday and Hasan's view, the texture of a text isrealized through two ways: one is the linguistic device, i.e., COHESION and the otherthe integrated function of the three metafunctions of language. It is based on this pointthat this thesis attempts to make a contrastive study of cohesion from the perspectiveof context of co-text. With a brief introduction of the serial novel A Dream of Red Mansions and itsEnglish version and the research methodology, chapter three mainly deals with thecontrastive study of grammatical cohesion from the co-textual perspective.Grammatical cohesion is categorized into reference, ellipsis, substitution andconjunction. This chapter focuses on the contrastive studies of the former threecohesive devices between the original text and the target text. The analysis producesthree main implications for translation practice. The first is that English definitelyuses more references, especially personal references and demonstrative references,than Chinese does, while Chinese employs zero reference or nominal repetition morefrequently than English. The second is that substitution is less used in Chinese than inEnglish and there's no one-to-one correspondence between Chinese and Englishsubstitution. The third is that there're more ellipses, verbal ellipses in particular,employed in English than in Chinese, while the frequency of the subject ellipsis isvery high in the original text but rather low in the target one, which results in so manysubjectless or subject-omitted clauses or sentences appearing in the original but veryfew in the target text of A Dream of Red Mansions. Chapter four concentrates on the contrastive study of lexical cohesion from theperspective of context of co-text. Lexical cohesion can be realized through reiterationand collocation. With regard to reiteration in particular, it is subdivided into repetition,synonym or near-synonym, superordinate and general word. Being the most directform of lexical cohesion, repetition is the focus of this chapter. It is drawn from thestudy that the Chinese text definitely employs more lexical repetitions to ensuretextual cohesion and meantime keep meaning consistent and coherent within thecontext of co-text than the English does. However, Chinese repetitions can bereplaced with other cohesive devices such as reference, synonym or ellipsis when putinto English. In the conclusion part, the whole thesis is summarized with the implicationsdrawn from the foregoing contrastive studies. First, context of co-text is the linguisticenvironment of a text which embodies meaning potentials in terms of language and isof crucial importance to deciding whether or not a text is a unified and coherentsemantic unit, i.e., context of co-text determines the texture of a text. Second, contextof co-text is determinant of the semantic relations between or among linguisticelements within a text, which is realized primarily through textual cohesion; andcohesion is a semantic relation embodied through linguistic devices. Third, thecontrastive study of Chinese and English needs the support of text linguistics inunderstanding the original text and appreciating its translated version as well; andcohesion is an indispensable and important component not to be neglected in thecreation of texture or coherence. Fourth, cohesive devices often co-occur in thecontext of co-text within a text. Fifth, owing to the fundamental differences betweenChinese and English, there're evident differences between cohesive devices employedin the original text and those in the target; therefore, we should take into consideration...