Discourse Cohesion. "a Dream Of Red Mansions" And Its English Translation

Nowadays, the focus of linguistic study has been shifted from the level of sentence to text. No longer satisfied with the analysis of single sentences, linguists began to study cohesion. Among the various linguistic schools, M. A. K. Halliday makes the greatest contribution to the construction of cohesion theory. He holds that"cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that defines as a text". In Cohesion in English, he divides the cohesive devices in English into five categories, which include reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, lexical cohesion, and provides detailed explanation. In an attempt to reveal the respective characteristics of cohesion of the Chinese texts and the English texts, on the basis of the cohesion theory promoted by Hallidy and Hasan, the thesis makes systematically contrastive study on cohesive devices used in the famous Chinese novel Hongloumeng and its English version A Dream of Red Mansions.Employing both the qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis of the text, the thesis systematically compares cohesive devices used in Hongloumeng and its English version A Dream of Red Mansions to illustrate their similar cohesion effects and respective differences. Chapter 34 of Hongloumeng and its English version are particularly selected to be under investigation, with the purpose of revealing the law of distribution of cohesive devices. Then, on the basis of statistics of the former investigation , samples in Hongloumeng and its English version A Dream of Red Mansions are illustrated. Furthermore, this thesis makes analysis of holism (wholism) V. S. individualism, the subjective thought and intuition to explain why omitting the subject and repetition are more frequent in Chinese than in English .