A Comparison Of Cohesive Devices Between Obama’s Speeches And CCTV Cup English Speeches

Since Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan was published in 1976, the term cohesion has become a major concern of scholars in many fields because of its importance, but few of the studies focus on the use of cohesive devices in English public speaking. Thus, this paper adopts Obama’s speeches and CCTV Cup English speeches as corpora and aims at investigating the cohesion phenomenon and the implication.Based on the theory of cohesion by Halliday and Hasan, through the quantitative study, this thesis makes a tentative endeavor to compare Obama’s speeches and CCTV speeches for getting clear ideas of how the effect of cohesion is realized through the cohesive devices in Obama’s speeches and CCTV Cup English speeches and what are the similarities and differences of the application of cohesive devices in the two kinds of speeches. The statistic analysis of the data shows the similarities and differences between Obama’s speeches and CCTV speeches. In terms of similarity, the following findings can be concluded. Firstly, compared with the use of ellipsis and substitution, the use of reference, conjunction, and lexical cohesion shares a higher frequency. Secondly, in many situations, the five devices of cohesion are used together, not just single one and associated with the situational background and cultural background of the passage (ref. the sample statistics in AppendixⅠandⅡ). Generally speaking, the difference is that except for the discrepancy of habitual expression and the different purposes of public speaking, compared with CCTV Cup public speeches, Obama uses more cohesive devices skillfully and tactfully. Therefore, the public speeches of Chinese students still have room for improvement, especially impromptu speeches.