Comparative Study Of Cohesive Devices Both In Spoken And Written Text

With the development of pragmatics and discourse analysis, cohesive theory attracts more and more attention in the field of linguistics. The publication of Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan symbolizes the birth of cohesive theory. Cohesion is the key part of discourse analysis and the basis of discourse understanding. Many linguists and teachers have done much research on this theory.The spoken text and the written text are two kinds of language expression, spoken language appears earlier than written language. Written language develops on the basis of spoken language , thus there are many similarities between spoken and written texts, but there exists different characteristics between them. Many linguists have explored theirs characteristics and relations from aspects of phonology, vocabulary, grammar and discourse organization. This thesis attempts to make comparative study of the using of cohesive devices both in the spoken and the written text to solve the following problems: what are similarities and differences between the spoken and the written text in using of cohesive devices? Which genre uses more cohesive devices? What is the reason causing the different numbers in using cohesive devices?On the basis of Hasan & Halliday's cohesion theory, this thesis aims at making an overall analysis of features and relations with the five types of cohesive devices: reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion both in the spoken and the written texts .The thesis selects twelve pieces of news in the New York Times as written texts and twelve scripts of American TV serials Family Album U.S.A. as spoken texts. With the aid of computer software and qualitative analysis as well as quantative analysis the following conclusions can be reached: both spoken and written texts use cohesive devices to make text coherent. Compared with the written text, the spoken text uses more cohesive devices. The genre differences result in the different uses of cohesive devices between two texts. It hopes that this thesis can be helpful for English learners both in spoken and the written English studies.