A Multi-dimensional Comparison Of Lexical Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese

The theory of cohesion and coherence has long been the hot topic in the linguistic circle. The book Cohesion in English written by Halliday and Hasan (1976) is often referred to as the classic relating to this topic. Since the publication of the book, a great many scholars have grown keenly interested in this linguistic phenomenon and written numerous articles to dwell on it, ranging from the cohesive devices to factors involved to achieve coherence.Halliday and Hasan classify the " non-structural cohesion" into two types—grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion, under which five sub-categories are included. Unfortunately, there are still some unavoidable limitations in the theory of lexical cohesion established by Halliday and Hasan. The two linguists only designate "reiteration"and "collocation" as the two typical realizations of lexical cohesion in the book-Cohesion in English, and they just identify the role of lexical cohesion as "co-extension". With regard to Michael Hoey's research findings, the lexical cohesive device constitutes most cohesive ties in the sample texts offered by Halliday and Hasan, but the illustration of it is not well proportioned in their works. Furthermore, Hoey (1991:10) claims that lexis is the unique cohesive device that contributes to forming a multi-layered relationship in a given text, for lexical cohesion also means that lexis may have associations with more than one other lexis, thus forming ties, bonds etc.Though this theory is applicable to English texts, whether the theory of lexical cohesion works well in the analysis of Chinese texts still needs to be tested. Here, it will suffice to say if we can come up with some idea that can throw light on the contrastive studies between English and Chinese, the efforts will be amply paid off. Also, the other principal aim of the thesis is to explore the relevance of lexical cohesive theory to other branches of general linguistics. And that is what "multi-dimensional" means in the title. If such relationship does exist, the research findings from the two aforementioned perspectives can readily be of potential usefulness to the province of applied linguistics, including language teaching, translation practice and lexicography, etc.The first two chapters provide readers with the basic concepts of cohesion, lexical cohesion, the historical background and up-to-date research on this issue..Chapter three discusses similarities and differences of four types of lexical cohesive devices in English and Chinese.Chapter four offers the reflections on lexical cohesion theory from a multi-dimensional perspective.Chapter five is the conclusion of the research conducted in the preceding chapters.