A Comparative Study Of The Three Chinese Versions Of Wuthering Heights From The Perspective Of Grammatical Cohesive Devices

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, Halliday&Hasan divide the cohesive devices in English into five categories — reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. And Huang Guowen classifies reference, substitution and ellipsis into grammatical cohesion, and the other two categories into lexical cohesion. The thesis adopts his classification.The form and the sense of linguistic elements in a discourse are integrated by the cohesive devices. In the sense, all the sentences and the paragraphs in a discourse are in the same semantic field, whereas every linguistic component has the function of interpretation. The realization of the discourse depends on the continuity of the linguistic component, which is a cohesive network of the interpretive components in structure and sense by some means. Therefore, the inherent analysis of the discourse will influence the quality of the translation.This thesis does a comparative research on three Chinese versions of Wuthering Heights from the aspect of cohesive devices, such as reference, substitution and ellipsis. The aim of the thesis is to explore the optimum manners to realize the grammatical coherence so that the translation which observes the grammatical rules in the target language will be achieved.The thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter One serves as an introduction, which accounts for the significance, purpose and method of the study. Chapter Two offers the theoretical considerations, including the relationship between translation and contrastive linguistics, the criteria of translation, definitions about cohesion and classification of grammatical cohesive devices as well as an overview of cohesion study in China. Chapter Three concentrates on the comparative analysis of the three Chinese versions of Wuthering Heights from each of the three categories of grammatical cohesive devices — reference, substitution and ellipsis. Finally, a conclusion is drawn in Chapter Four.