Cohesion In English And Chinese Legislative Texts

This thesis studies the cohesion devices of legislative texts, based on American and Chinese statutes. The cohesion theory adopted by the author is in the broad sense—it includes not only the 5 types of non-structural cohesive devices concluded by Halliday and Hasan in 1976 but also the structural ones proposed by Hasan and the famous Chinese scholar Hu Zhuanglin.The author finds that, legislative texts, as special and formal texts, frequently use some cohesive devices, which are quite different from those in other types of texts, and that the cohesive devices in English legislative texts (ELT) and Chinese legislative texts (CLT) share similarities as well as differences.From the perspective of non-structural cohesion, five devices given by Halliday and Hasan—reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion—are researched. There are only a few cases of substitution and few ellipses in ELT; substitution is rarely found but ellipsis is common in CLT. Use of other non-structural cohesive devices is common in both ELT and CLT.Reference includes 3 types—personal reference, demonstrative reference and comparative reference. Personal reference is featured by a departure from "the rules of pronominalization" in ELT and in CLT its items are simple and completely different from those used in daily Chinese. Demonstrative reference in ELT basically serves only as Modifier and rarely as Head or Adjunctive, and the demonstrative reference items in CLT are also different from those in daily Chinese. And among comparative reference, just a few particular comparisons are found in ELT and almost none in CLT, whereas general comparison is found in both ELT and CLT, much more often seen in the former than in the latter. General comparison in legislative texts is concentratedly realized by a small number of items.Conjunction has been classified in two ways from different perspectives by Halliday, both of which are taken for observation in this study. The study finds that ELT outnumbers CLT in varieties, items and use frequencies of conjunction, highlighting the logical difference between Chinese, as a paratactic language, and English, as a hypotactic one.Lexical cohesion in legislative texts mainly includes repetition, hyponymy, meronymy, antonymy and collocation. Synonymy in CLT, though just occasionally seen, is usually cohesive, whereas it is rarely a cohesive device in ELT, though synonyms are often found there.Observed from the structural perspective, parallelism, thematic progression, transitivity structure and mood structure function cohesively in different degrees. The discussion of the four structures in this thesis is limited in the aspect of cohesion.Parallelism helps form rhythm in the text, strengthening the cohesion of the text. Thematic progression plays an important role in cohesion in CLT, but in ELT it only functions so in some long sentences. Although material processes prevail in both ELT and CLT, the cohesion function of transitivity structure may be less noticed because it is not so obvious as the other three types of structure. In the mood structure of ELT and CLT, the Finite, realized by a very small set of items, has stable modality, enabling the text to achieve unity with cohesive mood.This study probes into the rules of using cohesive devices in ELT and CLT comprehensively and finds the similarities and differences between them. It is aimed to offer translators some reference in the choice of cohesive items in translation of statutes between English and Chinese. This thesis also offers a perspective to those engaged in the study of legislative language in China to consider the possibility of achieving better meticulousness in the statutes. And finally, this study can be helpful to the English learners interested in legislative texts in grasping the textual characteristics, thus enhancing their understanding of ELT.