A Contrastive Study Of Ellipsis In English And Chinese Texts

Grammatical cohesion plays a decisive role in text organization. It is a crucial element for creating texture and contributes much to text construction. Ellipsis is one type of devices in grammatical cohesion; therefore, this thesis makes an attempt to contrast ellipsis in English and Chinese on the basis of Halliday & Hasan's theory and some Chinese scholars'theories as Hu Zhuanglin's, Zhu Yongsheng's, Huang Guowen's, etc. The author takes the contrastive way to make a comparison of the collected corpus, analyzes the language phenomena and gives a reasonable explanation of it from the views of culture, philosophy, linguistic logic and objective historical background. On one hand, the author agrees with most scholars'or linguists'point of view that English and Chinese are different because of their different thinking ways. On the other hand, the author proposes that the reasons behind the different thinking ways lie in the different objective living processes of English and Chinese people. At last, the implication of the research is discussed. It is believed that this thesis will benefit both English learners and English-speakers who are learning Chinese because it will help them to overcome their own language habits of using ellipsis in the other language.By giving an introduction which elaborates the significance of the ellipsis study in textual cohesion, the theoretical basis, approach and main aim of the study, the author proposes that text linguists, especially the Chinese text linguists pay little attention to textual ellipsis, thus this thesis tries to make a specific comparison between English and Chinese textual ellipsis so as to make up the study gap. The thesis studies about the phenomena of all the three kinds of ellipsis in English and Chinese textual cohesion: nominal ellipsis, verbal ellipsis and clausal ellipsis, and it tries to analyze the elliptical phenomena in both English and Chinese language corpus. Also, it analyzes the reasons for the elliptical similarities and differences. The similarities and differences are closely related with language psychology, culture and philosophy of the two nations, and more importantly they are basically related with the objective historical backgrounds of western and Chinese people. In addition, the thesis proposes the applied values of ellipsis in textual cohesion, which mainly focuses on the language learning point.To sum up, ellipsis is one of the important features in the tendency of language development which increasingly indicates the coming towards maximum simplicity; therefore, the thesis tries to make a detailed comparison of English and Chinese textual cohesion so as to find the basic differences between English and Chinese, which may be helpful to the study of English and Chinese.