A Study Of The Cohesion Of Chinese Cross Talk Texts

One of the most popular forms of humor in China is the verbal art form known as cross talk. Chinese cross talk as a special art form wins popularity and favor among the masses with its artistic characteristics such as its humorous and appealing effect. Text is not just a string of sentences or simply a large grammatical unit, but a semantic unit; it can be either spoken or written. The biggest difference between text and non-text is that text has texture, while non-text has not texture. Cohesion is one of the linguistic features of text and it, together with coherence in discourse, is the core of the study of text linguistics and discourse analysis. The founder of Systemic Functional Grammar M.A.K Halliday has clearly pointed out in his book An Introduction to Functional Grammar that his aim of constructing functional grammar is to provide a theoretical framework for text analysis. This dissertation tries to study Chinese cross talk texts with the cohesion theory and to find out what role the cohesive devices play in the cohesion of Chinese cross talk texts. Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory is applied to analyzing the cohesion of Chinese cross talk texts. A corpus is set up for the statistical analysis of the cohesive ways in Chinese cross talk texts. With a qualitative analysis, then a conclusion is drawn that the cohesive devices perform different functions in Chinese cross talk texts. The grammatical cohesive devices mainly promote cohesion across sentences, while structural cohesive devices mainly promote cohesion in structure. Among structural cohesive devices, sound pattern is deliberately made use of by cross talk compilers to achieve cohesion, and then for the sake of comic effect.