A Comparative Study Of Cohesive Devices Used In English And Chinese Legislative Texts

The present research offers a comparative study of the similarities and differences between English and Chinese legislative texts in the use of cohesive devices so as to enrich the study of legislative texts as well as expand the scope of cohesion study.Adopting the cohesion theory by Halliday and Hasan, the study compares subcategories of cohesive devices used in the two sets of texts. Findings show that English and Chinese legislative texts are similar in the high frequency of repetition and additive conjunction and the rare occurrence of substitution and ellipsis, which can be regarded as a distinguishing feature of legislative texts. Differences lie in their preference for the subcategories of cohesive devices.In addition to an introduction and a conclusion, the thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter One introduces the definition of related terms and reviews the literature of previous studies. Chapter Two describes the research design including data collection and data processing and reports the results. Chapter Three discusses the results and implications and suggests further areas of the research.The results of the present study are suggestive for EFL teaching, translation and legal drafting and reading. More explorations are necessary in the future study of cohesion in legislative texts.