A Discourse-Stylistic Approach To The Cohesive Devices In The Old Man And The Sea

Cohesion in English written by Halliday & Hasan in 1976 is considered as a landmark in the development of cohesion theory. Since then, cohesive devices have become important linguistic categories in studying language usage and language function. Cohesion is a semantic relation between an element in the text and some other elements that are crucial to its interpretation. Cohesion is essential to the analysis and understanding of the discourse and is a significant device to help to realize the succinctness, coherence and the value of the language in the text. Cohesion extends beyond lexical items, phrases, sentences and discourse to rhetoric. Halliday & Hasan divided cohesive devices into two types: grammatical cohesion (reference, ellipsis, substitution and conjunction) and lexical cohesion (repetition, synonymy and collocation). Besides, Halliday & Hasan made an overall elaboration on the significant status of cohesion in linguistic study. But they overemphasized grammatical cohesion without paying adequate attention to lexical cohesion although in his further studies of cohesion Halliday began to realize this problem. This is just one of the gaps the present thesis will fill.Numerous linguists at home and abroad have published important works on cohesive devices covering both interdisciplinary studies related to pragmatics, semantics and stylistics and the definition, classification, significance and status of cohesion. However, seldom have linguists systematically reviewed the application and function of cohesive devices in organizing the whole text, especially in a complete classic literary work. Therefore, the present thesis intends to render insight into the internal structure of Hemingway's world-famous novel The Old Man and the Sea from a discourse-stylistic perspective by analyzing both the grammatical and lexical cohesive devices employed in it. Additionally, the paper will consider the relationship between the employment of cohesive devices in Hemingway's classic profound language techniques and his gist of heroism that encompasses a trinity of roles — Saint, Hero and Father.The thesis mainly consists of the foHowing five parts.The thesis starts with a general introduction to cohesion theory as established by Halliday & Hasan in 1976. The focus of this part is to give a literature review related to...