A Study Of Cohesion In The Text Of English Commercial Advertising

In pace with China's entry into the World Trade Organization and the gradual unification of global economy, English advertising has also become an important medium for the enterprises in our country to promote its export sales and open up international market; At the same time, the emergence of English advertisements in large numbers within the domestic market has made English advertising an important source for the enterprises and consumers in our country to obtain overseas information of products and services, and acquaint themselves with the developing tendency of different sorts of goods and technologies around the world. Therefore, how to appropriately understand and utilize English advertising language has prominent realistic significance.Cohesion and coherence in text are the most fundamental and important concepts in the field of text analysis. The systemic-functional linguists M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan have conducted researches on the concept and devices of cohesion for the purpose of discussing the coherence of text. In the book Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan proposed that cohesive devices in English could be divided into two major types: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. They emphasized for many times the importance of formal cohesive devices successively and considered cohesion as one of the prerequisites of textual coherence. Some other scholars point out that besides the apparent and surface cohesive devices in text raised by Halliday and Hasan, there still exists another implied and deep-level cohesive means. However, this kind of implied and deep-level cohesive device is not expounded detailedly yet and do not reach a unanimous conclusion.This thesis tries to conduct systematic and thorough analysis on the specific text of English commercial advertising from the perspective of explicit and implicit cohesion. Based on former scholars'researches, the author made clear definitions on the concept and its difference of explicit cohesion and implicit cohesion. Explicit cohesion refers to the apparent cohesive means that is"visible in vision, audible in hearing", namely a kind of cohesive device on the surface and form of text; Implicit cohesion refers to a text that is lack of apparent formal cohesive ties or is difficult for a person to master its meaning after first reading, however, by cognitive efforts or inferences, he/she can master the implied meaning that the text conveys. Both explicit cohesion and implicit cohesion are conducive to realizing textual coherence. In this study, both grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion that proposed by Halliday and Hasan are placed within the category of explicit cohesion. In addition, explicit cohesion also includes the"audible"cohesive means of phonological cohesion and the"visible"cohesive means of iconic cohesion; implicit cohesion is then classified into three major types: cohesion of semantic association, cohesion of implicature and cohesion of recessive context, this is because the understanding of coherence of texts which contain implicit cohesion cannot be separated from considering the important role that a person's psychological activities such as his/her subjective logical inference, association, etc. play. On the basis of the above classification, the author illustrates respectively the reflection of these cohesive devices in English commercial advertising text.Explicit and implicit cohesion has very strong convincing power to the explanation of English commercial advertising text. Explicit cohesion owns the traits of obviousness and clearness in form; while implicit cohesion possesses the traits of subjectivity and lagging in understanding. Both explicit cohesion and implicit cohesion are conducive to facilitating the coherence of text, and these two sorts of cohesive devices have its respective merits and can bring out the best in each other.