A Contrastive Study Of Cohesive Devices Between Ancient Chinese And Modern Chinese

The term cohesion was put forward by M.A.K. Halliday, an English linguist in the 1970s. It is one of the important characteristics of texts. Since each language has its own features in using cohesive devices to organize and create texts, it is necessary for writers, translators and readers to master the similarities and differences of cohesive devices between languages. Some differences are bound by the lexicogrammatical differences between languages involved, while others are related to the genres of texts. Contrastive study aims to analyze the similarities and differences between them and provide theoretical basis and ways for practice.Over the past thirty years more and more researches have been done on cohesive devices at home and abroad. However, compared with the research on the contrastive study of cohesive devices between modern Chinese and English, the research on the contrastive study of cohesive devices between modern Chinese and ancient Chinese is still in the underway stage. So far there have been no reports on such contrastive studies.In the present thesis, the author will analyze the similarities and differences of cohesive devices between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese to find out the basic characteristics of ancient Chinese at the textual level, and further the development of research on language teaching and translation.The author has conducted a contrastive study of three cohesive devices: reference, ellipsis and lexical cohesion between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese by analyzing ancient Chinese works and their corresponding modern Chinese translations. The results of the study show that (1) there are no possessive determiners and possessive pronouns in ancient Chinese, which means personal pronouns function in more cases in ancient Chinese than in modern Chinese; the demonstrative pronouns have many special uses in ancient Chinese; (2) ellipsis appears in both varieties of the Chinese language and in many similar situations. However, there are many differences because of the particular lexicogrammatical structures and the way of communicating in ancient Chinese. There are differences in both nominal ellipsis and verbal ellipsis. In nominal ellipsis, there are ellipsis of subject, ellipsis of object and ellipsis of zeugma, all of which have particular features in ancient Chinese. What's more, ellipsis of pronoun, prepositional ellipsis, and ellipsis before conjunction and implications can occur in ancient Chinese; (3) the use of one's first name to refer to the person, the special use of the third person pronoun and the use of a place, a position or a feature to substitute somebody or something lead to the differences between lexical cohesion.The results of the analysis of nine texts belonging to three genres (Letter, argumentation and Prose) show: (1) there is no cataphoric reference in all texts of both versions; (2) elliptical items appear more often in ancient version than in modern version; (3) referential items appear less often than in modern version; (4) there are fewer referential items in prose than in other two genres; (5) there are more elliptical items in prose than in other two genres; (6) lexical cohesion holds almost the same position. The results of the study also indicate that cohesive devices depend on the genre of text and are used to promote the coherence of text.In light of the results of the study, pedagogical implications for contrastive study of cohesive devices are discussed. The limitations of this study and corresponding suggestions for further research on the relative topic are also included so as to promote future study and improve language teaching and translation.