Referential Cohesion In English And Chinese Political Speeches: A Contrastive Study

Text refers to any piece of spoken or written language that forms a continuity in meaning. Since the 1970s, text analysis, as an important field of linguistic study, has received growing attention from linguists. One main area of text analysis is the study of the relationship between the sentences that helps form the continuity. Cohesion, the semantic relation between the sentences in the text, naturally becomes a hot topic in text analysis. Halliday & Hasan's theory of cohesion (1976) gives a detailed account of the English cohesive devices, and has aroused a keen interest in cohesion study. Reference, an important type of cohesive device, refers to the relationship between certain items in a language, which can only be interpreted by reference to something else. Reference plays a vital role in realizing cohesion, hence is the focus of the present study.However, in China most of the contrastive text analyses were conducted by using written language as their primary data, and there were few studies applying the theory of text analysis to a specific genre or using oral texts as the data. The present study attempts to use political speeches as the data, as they exhibit the dual characteristics of both written and spoken language and adopt abundant cohesive devices in their organization. The study aims at revealing as many similarities and differences between English and Chinese reference systems as possible, and tries to interpret the differences from the linguistic and cultural perspectives.Based on Halliday and Hasan's theory of cohesion, the thesis conducts a quantitative study on the English and Chinese reference systems, interprets the findings, and explores the causes of the differences and similarities.The thesis first reviews the original framework established by Halliday & Hasan, and the development in this field made by Hu Zhuanglin, etc. After summarizing the features of previous studies, purposes of the present study are specified.In the second chapter of the thesis, some basic concepts are clarified, and the types of reference are introduced. Then the thesis discusses the unique features of political speeches, and their influence on the use of reference. The main body of the thesis, Chapter Three, conducts a detailed quantitative analysis of reference cohesion used in English and Chinese political speeches.The fourth chapter discusses the frequent use of exophora caused by the specific situation and purposes of political speeches, and the frequent use of zero reference which is a prominent feature of the Chinese language.The conclusion of the present study is that although all the types of referential cohesion are found in both English and Chinese political speeches, they differ in usage and frequency. The discrepancies stem from the differences in linguistic system, the cultural conventions and the mode of thinking. Apart from the differences, similarities also exist in the use of reference, as a result of the common feature of political speeches. Another major claim of the present study is that exophoric reference, though does not directly bind sentences together in a text, does help create cohesion in an indirect way.