Contrastive Studies On Chinese And English Grammatical Cohesive Devices And The Causes Of Their Differences

From the perspective of current situation of text teaching in teaching Chinese as a foreign language and guiding by Halliday's functional linguistics, contrastive linguistics theories, discourse analysis and discourse cohesion theory, this paper fully compares the differences of reference, substitution and ellipsis in Chinese and English. In reference, besides the differences in forms and expressions, there are still some in frequency of use and functions. As for the differences of substitution in Chinese and English text, because words in English have the forms of inflection, noun institution words have singular and plural forms and verb institution words have vary tenses, which are not in Chinese. Secondly, institution phenomenon is not reflected in the expression of one- to- one relationship between.On the contrary, it reflected a larger difference. What's more, the frequency of using institution in Chinese is lower than that in English. There are omission of noun, verb and sentences in both Chinese and English. But omission in English is often accompanied by changes in form, while Chinese does not. The omission of verbs in English , especially the predicate verb is omitted more often than that in Chinese, while in Chinese the subject is always omitted. In addition, the omission phenomenon is not one- to- one relationship between these two languages.Thus, in comparison, from the perspective of our language system, we explore the reasons for the differences from micro aspects such as the linguistic typology theory and subject theory to macro aspects such as different ways of thinking, the national psychology, philosophy and culture. On the basis of the similarities, differences and the root causes of reference, substitution and ellipsis, we put forward proposals for the current problems in teaching discourse coherence and cohesion.We strive to give a full description of the similarities, differences of the three grammatical cohesive devices and a thorough analysis of root causes, putting forward the corresponding teaching strategies to reduce the errors in using them and try to improve the discourse coherence of Chinese learners whose native language is English. It is necessary to point out that they are just proposals, their implemencations need to be constantly fulfiled and improved and their effectiveness needs to be constantly tested in teaching practice.