The Use Of Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese

The previous contrastive studies claim that in terms of textual cohesion, English prefers reference and substitution while Chinese prefers repetition and ellipsis.This thesis aims to examine how English and Chinese are similar and different in their use of personal reference, demonstrative reference, substitution, and ellipsis as grammatical cohesive means, and repetition, synonyms or near synonyms, the superordinate or general words as lexical cohesive means in achieving text cohesion through a case study of the first three chapters of Vanity Fair and their Chinese translations, and with the findings, to test the general conclusions of the previous studies on the use of cohesive devices in English and Chinese.Different from most previous studies, this thesis not only takes a quantitative approach to the subject, but also analyzes the corpus in terms of cohesion with immediate, mediary, and remote ties by using Halliday & Hasan (1976)'s theory and Zhang Delu & Liu Rushan (2003) 's mode. Our study shows that in the case of cohesion with immediate ties, the differences between English and Chinese are more conspicuous in the use of cohesive devices, and our findings are more or less in keeping with those of the previous studies; that is, English makes more use of reference than Chinese, whereas Chinese makes more use of repetition than English. But in the case of cohesion with mediary and remote ties, we find more similarities than differences between English and...