A Contrastive Study Of Reference In E-C Journalist Texts And Translation

Modern linguists agree that cohesion is an indispensable feature of the text, although they may have different definitions about"cohesion". Halliday & Hasan take the view that the primary determinant of whether a set of sentences do or do not constitute a text depends on cohesive relationships within and between the sentences, which create texture, and that the concept of cohesion is a semantic one, referring to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text.The study of cohesion has been an important part both in English and Chinese. In English, the rise of text linguistics in the 1950s has expanded the study field of cohesion. In Chinese, however, the study of cohesion has always been an indispensable part of Chinese rhetoric. Even so, because of the short history of text linguistics, theories on textual cohesion are mainly borrowed from the west. But, many scholars and their researches have contributed a lot to the contrastive study of English-Chinese cohesive devices, which provide many insights to English-Chinese translation. However, most of them just give a general comparison and contrast between the texts of these two languages. Texts of different genres present different linguistic characteristics, and there might be specific features concerning cohesive devices. This thesis is aimed to study a specific genre– journalist texts, and to show the application of a specific cohesive device– reference in English and Chinese news, and try to find out the similarities and differences in this aspect between these two languages, with the attempt that it may make some contributions to translation.The research conducted in this thesis is an empirical contrastive study. A corpus is built, and in order to attain scientific results, some statistical programs are employed. The results demonstrate that both English and Chinese journalist texts employ a large number of references as a cohesive device, but the frequencies of specific types of reference are different. The most remarkable differences lie in personal reference and demonstrative reference. Based on the research results, the thesis makes tentative suggestions concerning the translation of reference in English-Chinese translating process. This thesis consists of 6 chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction to this thesis, including the subject of the research, methodology employed in this research and significance of this research.Chapter two serves as a literature review, in which the contributions of other scholars in this field, both domestic and overseas, are summarized. Chinese scholars'contrastive researches and their constructive findings are included. The thesis first traces back into the history of text linguistics, then introduces the theories on contrastive studies. As this thesis aims at the contrastive studies of reference, achievements of scholars in the field of cohesion and reference are also included in this part. The Chinese scholars, such as Xu Yulong, Zhu Yongsheng, have made great achievements in this field. On the basis of summarizing findings of the previous studies, characteristics and purposes of the present study are made clear.Chapter three focuses on terminologies employed in this thesis. Several terms closely related to the study are clarified, and reference and its function in cohesion are introduced. The thesis first clarifies the definition of cohesion, then introduces Halliday and Hasan's theories on cohesion, which serve as a theoretical framework for the research in this thesis. Based on the essence of Halliday & Hasan's research and the findings of other scholars, Hu Zhuanglin has advanced a multi-layer thought in text cohesion and coherence, and thus further expanded the scope of cohesion. Zhang Delu and Liu Rushan raise the idea of cohesive relation between text and context.As the dominant part of this thesis, chapter four focuses on comparisons between various types of reference between English and Chinese journalist texts. The relative data and research findings are included in this part. In this chapter, the thesis first introduces the classification of reference, namely, personal reference, demonstrative reference and comparative reference, then makes a contrast of them between English and Chinese. With the data and examples selected from the corpus, the thesis demonstrates that although there are many similarities between reference in English journalist texts and that in Chinese journalist texts, significant differences do exist.Based on the analysis and results from chapter four, chapter five presents itself as a tentative suggestion concerning translation strategies adopted in English-Chinese journalist texts translation. As the differences mainly concern personal reference and demonstrative reference, the thesis puts forward some tentative suggestions regarding the translation of personals and demonstrative reference item"the + NP".Chapter six concludes this research briefly. Moreover, the complications and limitations of this thesis are also presented in this part.