A Contrastive Study Of News Text Coherence Between Chinese And English

Coherence is one of the most important and the most complicated topics in discourse analysis. It has become a focus of research in the recent two decades.With regard to the concept of coherence, different interpretations have been provided, but no consensus has been reached. After a survey of views held by language researchers, the author offers the conclusion that Coherence is not only a form question, but also a semantic feature which is not determined by the text itself, but by the extra-linguistic features which include the social cultural background, the cognitive psychological model, and the relation between the discourse and the context. The language activities occur in a certain cognitive environments, which will directly or indirectly influence or control the choice and the communication of the discourse and the choice of the linguistic forms.Although great achievements have been made in the study of text coherence, but most previous studies focus on surface level, especially on cohesion and ignore the deep motivation like the effect of social, cognitive, and psychological factors.In view of the above situation, the author carries out a study of news text coherence from the perspective of thinking pattern at the cognitive level. The thesis gives a contrastive analysis of discourse features of news between Chinese and English on the basis of different thinking patterns. The method of the thesis is the combination of description and the explanation, the qualified and the quantitative as well as the contrastive analysis. The corpus of the thesis is from bilingual texts on the Chinese website of the Financial Times, a very prestigious newspaper in Britain and some authoritative domestic newspapers. By comparing the Chinese and English corpus, the thesis aims to find out the how the Chinese and western thinking patterns affect the languages at the discourse level.The thesis consists of six parts: Introduction part presents the purpose and the significance of the research, and gives the framework of the thesis.Chapter One is a brief overview of relevant literature. This chapter gives an introduction of text coherence and the previous studies of it, including definition of text, different interpretations of coherence, relations between cohesion and coherence, as well as the connection between coherence, thinking pattern, and translating. It reveals that text coherence is also a cognitive psychological phenomenon.Chapter Two summarizes the major features of Chinese and Western thinking patterns. Basically, Chinese thinking patterns are synthetic, subject-oriented, circular and intuitive while western thinking patterns are analytic, object-oriented, linear, as well as rational.Chapter Three provides the comparison and analysis of Chinese and English news texts on the basis of different thinking patterns. The findings are: Chinese is parataxis language, and English is a kind of hypotaxis; Chinese text is developed as spiral structure while English text is developed as the linear structure; Chinese follows general-particular order while English follows particular-general order; the Chinese are apt to employ active voice while the English are apt to employ passive voice. In this chapter, a lot of examples are offered to help clarify the textual features.Chapter Four is concerned with implications of all the above analysis for English-Chinese translation. It points out the importance of transfer of thinking patterns in the course of translation and puts forward some methods of transfer in translation.The last part is conclusion. It summarizes the main points of the research and points out its practical value in the writing and translation of news texts.