Contrastive Study On Cohesive Devices In English Business Contract Texts And Their Chinese Versions

Cohesion is one of the key themes in text analysis. In the book Cohesion in English (1976), Halliday&Hasan give a detailed and sufficient account of the English cohesive devices (CDs for short), which has aroused a keen interest in the study of cohesion.Based on Halliday&Hasan's cohesion theory, this paper attempts to make a contrastive study on CDs used in Chinese and English contract texts, in the hope of investigating the main CDs used in the two texts and the similarities and differences between the two cohesion systems as well as the features of these CDs. So as to provide the draftsman and translators of business contract as well as English learners with an insight of the CDs adopted in business contract texts (BCTs for short).In this paper, 15 English contracts and their Chinese versions have been chosen as the research samples. And there are 17,074 words in English data and 22,829 words in Chinese data.In this research, both the qualitative and quantitative methods are used with the former being the major method. The statistical study of the data reveals the main CDs in BCTs, that is, in English business contracts, the main CDs are: lexical CDs, conjunction, reference, nominal ellipsis, verbal ellipsis, and in the Chinese texts, they are lexical CDs, conjunction, reference, nominal ellipsis and nominal substitution. Then the similarities and dissimilarities of different CDs in the data are examined. At last, the features of these CDs are analyzed: 1. For reference, the archaic words are frequently used, and the first and second person pronouns and third female person pronouns are seldom used in both English and Chinese texts. 2. Nominal substitution in Chinese BCTs are mainly in the form of"modifier +的",while in English contracts, nominal substitution is seldom used. 3. The nominal ellipsis in both English and Chinese contracts are mainly ellipsis of subject, and verbal ellipsis in English texts is mainly ellipsis of operator, etc. 4. Some prepositions in English texts are expressed by conjunctions in their Chinese versions, mostly by temporal conjunctions. Causal conjunctions such as"若","如果"have been added when some inverted sentences, mostly led by the operator"should"in English texts, were translated into Chinese.Despite the findings which may give some practical implications to the translation and teaching as well as learning of business contracts, limitations still exist due to the lack of the research samples and the author's knowledge. And further examination is necessary for the results. Anyway, it is hoped that the tentative study could give inspiration to the application of cohesion theory to analysis of business texts and serve as a preparatory basis for more comprehensive and scientific studies in the future.