A Contrastive Study Of Cohesion In English And Chinese Tourist Texts

The research on the text analysis has enjoyed a great development since 1960s. Textual cohesion, positioned at the core of text analysis, is a key notion in the justification of a text. Since the publication of Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hassan in 1976, cohesive devices in texts have aroused keen interest and become a heated topic in text linguistics. The theory of cohesion put forward in this book, where these two scholars elaborated the five main English cohesive devices, is honored as the most representative achievement in this field.In China, most of the study on textual cohesion is based on foreign viewpoints. However, a great number of scholars have carried out fruitful researches on the contrastive study of the English and Chinese cohesive devices. It is important to notice that most of these contrastive discourse studies are conducted on text in a broad sense, with few applying the theory to a specific genre. What is more, as previous researches mostly focus on literary works for the contrastive analysis of cohesive devices, the conclusions thus drawn may not be applicable to other types of texts. The present thesis chooses tourist texts as the corpus, and aims to find out how the concise and simple language contributes to the total cohesion and effective description of the tourist attraction. Under the guidance of Halliday and Hassan's theory of cohesion, this thesis is intended to make a contrastive analysis of the cohesive devices that are effectively employed in English and Chinese tourist texts, in the expectation of exploring plausible translation strategies.Corpus-based data is chosen in this thesis to ensure its authenticity. To guarantee the validity and the comparability of this thesis, some principles are laid down for the selection of the sample texts. First, the texts should be taken in their original versions from original tourist materials published recently. No translated texts will be analyzed in the study, for the translated ones will be inevitably influenced by the original versions and the target language structures. Second, each text is limited in length, with around 150-200 words, so as to make sure the similar length of the total texts. Under the requirements proposed above, the author randomly chooses 100 texts (50 from English and 50 from Chinese).The study begins with a case study of one pair of English and Chinese text, elaborating on their respective employment of five cohesive devices. Then a statistic study will be carried out based on the corpus, analyzing the total frequency of each cohesive device and the two languages' preference for the choices of cohesive devices. Findings show that more cohesive ties are employed in English than in Chinese. Both two groups show a high frequency in the order of lexical cohesion, reference and conjunction, while substitution is less preferred in both. What is distinct between them is that English has a higher reference percentage of the total cohesive ties than Chinese, while Chinese uses more ellipsis than English.Through the contrastive analysis of 100 English and Chinese tourist texts, similarities and dissimilarities of their cohesive devices are examined, as well as the possible reasons. With these findings, the paper aims to shed light on the possible translation strategies.The thesis falls into five chapters. Apart from the introduction and conclusion parts, Chapter Two gives a comprehensive review of the cohesion theory and previous researches carried out in this field both at home and abroad. Chapter three goes on to clarify some of the related notions in cohesion and text. Chapter Four constitutes the empirical study, on the basis of which generalization of the similarities and distinctions are made of cohesive devices between the two types. Some possible translation strategies are also proposed.