A Contrastive Analysis Of Several Lexical Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese

Conventional study on lexical items regards them as linguistic units to fill the slots of syntactic structure, neglecting their functions in discourse. Over recent years, discourse analysis has enjoyed vigorous growth with a shift of emphasis on the pragmatic meanings and functions of linguistic forms, extending the study range of lexical items from sentence level to discourse level.Ever since Halliday and Hasan made an authoritative research on cohesion in 1976, it has been a crucial research topic in the field of discourse analysis. They maintain that the reason for cohesion to render a passage a text lies in the fact that cohesion tightly joins sentences by means of grammatical and lexical devices. Lexical cohesion is regarded as the most important and interesting research topic in terms of cohesion study. Halliday and Hasan make use of the concept that language system includes lexical elements to interpret the cohesive means of a language, therefore, they regard lexical items as major cohesive devices in discourse. Text provides context for the creation and interpretation of relations between lexical items, while lexical items form "texture" of a text.Since Cohesion in English was published, cohesion theory has arrested extensive attention of linguistic circles. It must be admitted that cohesion theory is far from invulnerability. Brown and Yule, in Discourse Analysis(1983), clearly point out that there does not exist corresponding relation between the formal marker of cohesion and certain cohesive meaning. Furthermore, Halliday and Hasan fail to make clear definition for the vague conception of "collocation" while making discourse analysis. Therefore, they exclude "collocation" when they re-expounded lexical cohesion in 1985. Zhu Yongsheng, in Reflections on Systemic-Functional Linguistics(2001), makes supplements and partial amendments to several cohesive devices described by Halliday and Hasan, confirming their achievements in static analysis of cohesive devices of English.In view of the above, this thesis makes a contrastive analysis of four major lexical cohesive devices such as synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms and collocationin English and Chinese on the basis of Halliday and Hasan' theory on lexical cohesion to explore the similarities and differences of lexical cohesion in English and Chinese. Finally, this thesis clarifies the view that lexical cohesion in English and Chinese should be regarded as key links of discourse structure in spite of their differences in specific forms.This thesis takes the view that Halliday and Hasan' theory on lexical cohesion, based on semantic relations between lexical items, makes a study of the functions of different lexical items or elements inside discourse toward discourse coherence. It needs to be pointed out that semantic relations referred to here are mainly concerned with the ideational meanings of lexical items rather than their connotative meanings and stylistic meanings. Meanwhile, lexical cohesion is limited by the context of discourse. We will make a contrastive analysis of lexical cohesion in English and Chinese with selected examples from such written corpus as novels, poetry, prose and legal texts on the basis of semantic relations. Furthermore, an exploration will be made of the differences and similarities of lexical cohesion in English and Chinese as well as its reference significance to language teaching and translation from the viewpoints of language, culture and mode of thinking.This thesis is composed of seven chapters.Chapter One introduces the motivation, methodology, theoretical framework and definition of lexical cohesion;Chapter Two recommends the explanation and analysis of lexical cohesion by different schools of linguists;Chapter Three starts with an analysis of the cohesive functions of synonyms in discourse and continues with an analysis of the differences and similarities in the use of synonyms in English and Chinese from the perspectives of discourse type and language structure;Chapter Four starts with an analysis of the cohesive functions of antonyms in text and continues with an analysis of the differences and similarities in the use of antonyms from the viewpoints of kinship terms, word-formation, syllable and text type;Chapter Five first probes the cohesive functions of hyponyms in discourse and then probes the differences and similarities in the use of hyponyms in English and Chinese;Chapter Six expounds the cohesive functions of collocation in text and implications of cultural values by collocational cohesion in English and Chinese;Chapter Seven discusses the reference significance to translation & foreign language teaching especially in terms of text structure, reading comprehension, writing and vocabulary teaching.