Studies On Lexical Cohesive Devices In English Contract Laws

Cohesion is one of the important studies of textual research. Cohesion relations can be divided into two categories----grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion, the effect of lexical cohesion can be achieved by different lexical choices in a text. In 1976, Halliday and Hasan first proposed cohesion theory which made cohesion one of the widest research fields in textual linguistic study. However, most of the textual linguistic studies concentrate on general styles, and ignore the style of law texts. Based on the present research conditions, the paper aims to figure out the similarities and differences of lexical cohesive choices among English law texts, thus get the enlightening for English law learning and translation practice.Through analysis of the data, the author gets the following conclusions: 1. in English law texts, the frequency of lexical cohesive expressions are calculated to provide references to English law teaching. 2. Among the six lexical cohesive devices, synonym and near-synonym devices proved to be the most frequently used devices in English law texts with the 6ther five devices ranking in a decreasing manner: repetition, antonym, collocation and superordinate. Such studies facilitate second language learners to better understand cohesion in the course of learning and translating English law texts.