A Contrastive Study On Cohesive Devices In Chinese And English Texts

As a quite influential linguistic school,"Systemic Functional Linguistic"has its own approaches over the researches on the phenomenon and theories of languages and achieved a lot of academic results. Regarding text as its object of language-research, Systemic Functional Linguistic claimed that if a linguist only depicted the language system instead of taking texts into account, he wouldn't gain any result.In their book"Cohesion in English", Halliday and Hasan first applied the term of"text cohesion", which was widely accepted in the following studies in this field. Since being introduced in China in 1980s, the theory and approaches in the study of Systemic Functionalism began to draw more and more attentions from the Chinese researchers (such as Hu Zhuanglin, Zhu Yongsheng, Zhang Delu,etc.) and was applied in text analysis. Among all the research subjects, the study of text cohesion is one of the most important branches, which produced a great number of research achievements.In the field of text cohesion studies, researches on the contrastive text analysis between Chinese and English have been increasing in the resent years. A lot of scholars have done contrastive studies on the differences between Chinese texts and English texts, among which the analysis on English texts in both describing the language and summarizing the rules has get plenty of substantial achievements. As the research work being carried out in a wider range, studies on the features of cohesive devices in Chinese texts has come to a deeper and more extensive level. Meanwhile, more and more contrastive researches on cohesive devices in Chinese and English language came out and a great number of experts or scholars shared their constructive opinions on that subject, which lead in fruitful academic achievements.This paper is based on Cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan. According to their classification, cohesive devices can be categorized into reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunctions and lexical cohesion, which have their different application in Chinese and English. Refenrence, substitution, ellipsis and conjuctions are grammatical devices and can be defined as"grammatical cohesion". In this paper, we use the terms"grammatical cohesion"and"lexical cohesion"as the classification expressions in comparison. Guided by Systemic Functional Linguistic theories and Cohesion theory of texts, based on comparisons of numerous examples and previous academic researches, this paper aims to discuss the differences of cohesive devices between Chinese texts and English texts, summarize their similarities and differences and generalize the rules of cohesive devices in Chinese and English texts. The examples in the paper are well-known texts and their translation versions, which are expected to make the results of analysis typical and accurate.