A Contrastive Study Of Patterns Of Lexical Cohesion In English And Chinese Texts

Cohesion, as one of the most important components of texture, has aroused the interests of many linguists and scholars, e.g. Halliday & Hasan(1976), Hasan (1984, 1985), Michael Hoey (1991), Hu Zhuanglin(1994), Zhu Yongsheng(2001) and Liao Qiuzhong(1992) etc. Cohesion can be divided into two types: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Lexical cohesion, achieved via vocabulary choice, is the only type of cohesion that regularly forms multiple relationships and therefore the dominant mode of creating texture. The study of the greater part of cohesion is the study of lexical cohesion, and the study of cohesion in text is to a considerable degree the study of patterns of lexis in text. But less attention has been paid to lexical cohesion and little detailed and independent description is provided, which is incompatible with the significant role that it plays in text construction.So the current thesis, adopting Hoey's (1991) lexical repetition framework as model with some minor adoptions from Halliday and Hasan's (1976) scheme, attempts to compare and contrast lexical cohesion in English and Chinese texts. Lexical cohesion here is intermingled with lexical repetition, which is classified into nine categories— simple lexical repetition, complex lexical repetition, simple mutual paraphrase, simple partial paraphrase, antonymous complex paraphrase, other complex paraphrase, substitution, co-reference and ellipsis. In terms of this classification, one English essay and three corresponding Chinese renditions of high quality are investigated and they display divergence in the use of lexical cohesive devices. Then it further compares patterns of lexis of three Chinese renditions, which treat the original lexical cohesion differently. Findings of this thesis suggest that Hoey's patterns of lexis also apply to Chinese texts and contribute a great deal to the translation strategies of lexical cohesion—overt translation and covert translation.