A Contrastive Analysis Of Cohesion In E/C Computer Texts And E/C Translation

The target of study of text analysis usually concentrates on the language unit above sentence or clause, which differs from sentence or clause, not in length but in cohesion. Naturally, cohesion has become one of the key objects of text analysis. The publication of Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan (1976) marks the foundation of the theory of cohesion, and then has aroused a keen interest in cohesion research. In China, many scholars have conducted systematic contrastive studies on textual cohesion between English and Chinese and applied research results to foreign language teaching and translation practices.However, it is noteworthy that most contrastive analysis of cohesion at home is carried out in a broader sense or in a qualitative way. Little has been done about a specific text type. This thesis, taking Halliday and Hasan's theory of cohesion as the theoretical foundation, aims to carry on a contrastive study on cohesion in E/C computer texts. In the process of text analysis, the quantitative approach is employed in combination with the qualitative one. Based on the statistical analysis, this thesis describes similarities and dissimilarities in cohesive devices between the two kinks of texts, explores the reasons contributing to the phenomenon, and further discusses the application of the research results in foreign language teaching and translation.Through corpus analysis, the thesis draws the following conclusions:1) The most conspicuous phenomenon is that there is a high degree of cohesive similarity between English computer texts and their Chinese counterparts. That is to say, there are much more similarities than dissimilarities. This phenomenon is determined by the features of computer text types.2) Though these text types have a high percentage similarity in terms of cohesion, dissimilarities still exists in that English and Chinese belong to different linguistic systems, and have different thinking patterns and expression conventions.3) Among all the five cohesive devices, lexical cohesion, reference and conjunction are the top three, in the sequence of from high frequency to low frequency. By comparison, ellipsis is much less employed while substitution does not appear at all.