An Explorative Study On Cohesion And Coherence In English Writing

Great differences can be found between the English language and the Chinese language. Due to mother tongue influence, Chinese students often fail to make their English writing cohesive and coherent. The present research is an attempt to solve this problem through a contrastive analysis of hypotaxis in English and parataxis in Chinese, and it is hoped that it will help Chinese students improve their abilities in English writing in the aspect of cohesion and coherence.The hypotaxis-parataxis theory was first proposed by Wang Li in his book Chinese Grammar Theory (1984). In this book, he points out that hypotaxis and parataxis are two essential devices for organizing elements in language. This theory analyzes the characteristics and differences of English and Chinese from the angel of discourse cohesion and coherence. He also shows his opinion that hypotaxis is more often used in the making of English sentences whereas parataxis is largely used in the making of Chinese sentences. After Wang Li, Gao Mingkai and Lian Shuneng also contribute a lot in this field. And Lian gives us a detailed discussion about this in his book Constructive Studies of English and Chinese in 1993. The hypotaxis-parataxis theory has been further studied and widely applied in English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation, yet it has seldom been applied in writing. This thesis is an attempt to apply the hypotaxis-parataxis theory to English writing classes and it...