A Contrastive Study Of Lexical Cohesion In Chinese And English Discourse And Its Application In Translation

Cohesion and coherence have been of great concern in the linguistic and the translation circle since the establishment of cohesion theory in the nineteen seventies marked by the publication of Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English. Many linguists and scholars have been studying them and have tried to establish the relation between them and their importance in the creation of a text. According to Halliday and Hasan, there are three major functional-semantic components, the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual. Cohesion is part of text-forming component in the linguistic system. Cohesion, as an important part of texture, has been largely explored by many scholars and applied in language teaching and translation. However, one of the categories of cohesion, lexical cohesion has received relatively little attention, which is still in need of systematic discussion, and how the cohesive differences between the two languages affect translation strategies in the translation practice should be further combed and perfected. Actually, lexical cohesion plays a decisive role in text organization. It is the crucial element for creating texture and contributes much to text construction.On the basis of Halliday & Hasan's model of text cohesion, this paper attempts to compare lexical cohesion in English and Chinese using Hoey's theoretical framework, and systematically discusses translation strategies in accordance with the textual differences between the two languages.This paper consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 makes a brief review of the origin and development of cohesion theory, the relation between cohesion and coherence. It also accounts for the purpose and coverage of the study. Chapter 2 reviews the studies on cohesion and introduces the classification of cohesion and its relation text organization, the extension of the theory made by Halliday and Hasan, Hoey, Hu,Zhuanglin, Zhu Yongsheng and Zhang Delu. Chapter 3 goes into a detailed analysis on Hoey's classification on lexical cohesion and test whether Hoey's patterns of lexis also apply to Chinese text. The collected data were presented in this part and an initial analysis was made to explore the using frequency of the different lexical cohesion between English and Chinese. Chapter 4 makes a further contrastive study and a detailed analysis on more data, which is a development and extension of Chapter 3. On the basis of the contrastive analysis in the previous chapters, Chapter 5 attempts to probe into the implication on translation teaching, and translation strategies concerning the effective management of cohesive devices.