A Study On Cohesive Devices In English Business Letters

Since Halliday and Hasan published their book Cohesion in English, a large number of scholars have been devoted to studying cohesion in texts. However, few of them focus on cohesion in business letters. Business letter is an important means for business activities. It is of great significance to study its cohesive features. Therefore, based on Halliday and Hasan's cohesion theory, this thesis takes both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze cohesive devices used in English business letters and further makes a contrastive study between English and Chinese business letters to find out their similarities and differences in the use of cohesive devices. The present study aims to get some implications for Chinese to write English business letters.Cohesive features of English business letters identified from the present study can be summarized as follows. First, in English business letters cohesive devices widely occur with lexical cohesion taking up the largest proportion followed by reference and conjunction. Substitution and ellipsis seldom occur in English business letters. Second, demonstrative reference is used more frequently than personal and comparative references and it is expressed mostly by the definite article the and proximal demonstratives. Possessive pronouns seldom occur in English business letters to form personal referential relation. Third, additive conjunction is more often employed than the other subcategories of conjunction, and in casual conjunction conjunctive elements expressing the result have higher occurrences than those expressing the reason. Conjunction is mostly expressed by simple form of conjunctives. Four, repetition and collocation occur far more frequently than synonym, superordinate and general item in the lexical cohesive relation.More similarities are found than differences in the use of cohesive devices between English and Chinese business letters, but those dissimilarities deserve special attention. Firstly, English business letters generally use more cohesive devices than Chinese business letters. In the use of each cohesive device, English business letters use lexical cohesion most frequently, followed by reference, conjunction, ellipsis, and substitution, while Chinese business letters also use lexical cohesion most frequently, but followed by ellipsis, conjunction, reference, and substitution successively. Secondly, personal reference seldom occur in Chinese business letters, and the widely used reference item the has no equivalent in Chinese, which leads to the use of repetition instead in Chinese business letters. Thirdly, nominal ellipsis occurs frequently in Chinese business letters but rarely in English business letters. Fourthly, Chinese business letters adopt less conjunction than English business letters.Based on the above findings, the present study finally puts forward some suggestions for Chinese to write English business letters, which will enlighten them to write higher-quality English business letters.