A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Cohesion Between Chinese And English

In the nineteenth seventies, Halliday and Hasan published the book Cohesion in English, marking the establishment of cohesion theory. Since then, the theory of cohesion and coherence has developed continuously. In recent years, a lot of translators have introduced the achievements in this field into translation. Cohesion is necessary in text production and the translation of it is important in text translation. Translators' awareness and mastery of cohesive devices and their recognition of the cohesive differences between different languages are crucial because they not only affect the translators' understanding of the source text but also influence the quality of the target text.In Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan divide the cohesive devices in English into five categories—reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. And Huang Guowen classifies reference, substitution and ellipsis into grammatical cohesion, and the other two categories into lexical cohesion. This thesis adopts this classification.In the framework of Halliday's cohesion theory, this thesis does a contrastive research on grammatical cohesion with the examples taken from the Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng by Cao Xueqin and its two English versions. It analyzes their specific usage and overall distribution characteristics in English and Chinese, and explores the optimum manners to realize grammatical cohesion in English and Chinese, so that the translation which observes the grammatical rules in the target language will be achieved.This thesis is divided into five parts. The first part serves as an introduction, which accounts for the significance, purpose and method of the study. The second part gives a brief introduction of the theoretical framework of the study, including the concept of text and texture, the relationship between text and translation, different definitions about cohesion, as well as the distinction between cohesion and coherence. The third part discusses the relationship between cohesion and translation, which is the focus of the thesis, as well as the objectives of the present thesis. The fourth part concentrates on the contrastive analysis of the three categories of grammatical cohesive devices—reference, substitution and ellipsis with the examples from the original Chinese novel Hong Lou Meng and its two English versions A Dream of Red Mansions and The Story of the Stone. The fifth part ends the thesis with a summary of the present study and suggestions for future study.