A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese Text And Its Application In Translation

Text linguistics, contrastive linguistics and translation theory have been the focuses of linguistic research. While a lot of literature probes into these three fields respectively, very few books venture to fuse them together. As a result, the present study is a tentative attempt to conduct a comprehensive study.Three books compose the theoretical basis for this thesis: a) Cohesion in English by Halliday & Hasan, which introduces such concepts as text, cohesion, coherence, etc., with the emphasis on five cohesive devices: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. b) Contrastive Studies of English and Chinese by Lian Shuneng. It illustrates the distinction between the two languages from perspectives of grammatical features, rhetorical devices, thought patterns and cultural factors, pointing out that English attaches importance to hypotaxis while Chinese parataxis. c) A Contrastive Study of Cohesion in English and Chinese by Zhu Yongsheng, Zheng Lixin and Miao Xingwei. Through a large number of examples, this book describes the differences between English and Chinese cohesive devices, and looks further into the reasons from language systems and culture backgrounds.In their book Cohesion in English, Halliday & Hasan(1976:2) argue that"A text has texture, and this is what distinguishes it from something that is not a text."Texture includes two aspects: one is structural features involving thematic structure and information structure; the other is non-structural features which refer to cohesion in text. To put it simply, cohesion relations are relations between two or more elements in a text that are independent of the structure. Halliday & Hasan(1976: 4) define it as"the INTERPRETATION of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another". Cohesion roughly falls into two kinds: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. The former, which includes reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction, will be elaborated in this paper. Since cohesion plays an important role in the study of text, the contrast of cohesive devices should by all means be regarded as an indispensable component in the contrastive study of text.As the development of linguistic research, language contrast is no longer confined to the lever of sentence or language units smaller than that. Text has become the new emphasis of contrastive study. Text contrast can be divided into two kinds: macro-comparison and micro-comparison. The latter comprises structural comparison and non-structural comparison. And non-structural comparison mainly involves the contrast of cohesive devices.