Contrastive Analysis Of Cohesive Devices In Chinese And English Song Lyrics

As we all know, song is the vocal art with popular appeal among the people and meansto express emotions. There are two reasons why songs are popular: first, their beautifulmelodies; second, their simple and catchy lyrics. Those songs that withstand the test of thetime have been regarded as the classic ones, of which their lyrics do worth study. The texts oflyrics with their richer and more colorful characteristics have attracted wide attention ofacademia.Song lyrics and poetry share the same cultural origin in history. Song lyrics are aspecial literary form developing gradually from poetry but independent from poetry.Therefore, they also need the cohesive devices to realize the expression of meaning, and maydisplay their own features different from other texts in the application of cohesive devices.Based on the cohesion theory of Halliday & Hasan, this thesis will make a deep and thoroughcontrastive analysis on the cohesive devices used in English and Chinese song lyrics, andprobe into the reasons for the existing similarities and differences from linguistic, cultural andideological aspects. This tentative study not only fills in the gap of the study on cohesion insong lyrics, but also expands the applied range of the cohesion theory.With the related theory of contrastive linguistics, the research has been conducted onlinguistic data made up of 50 English and 50 Chinese songs selected by simple randomsampling from the books The Oscar Classic songs 100 and CCTV Spring Festival GalaEvening Hot songs 100 respectively. Both the qualitative and quantitative methods areemployed to make this contrastive analysis.The results come out that both similarities and differences exist in the texts of Englishsong lyrics (ESL) and Chinese song lyrics (CSL) in the adoption of cohesive devices. Thesimilarity is that the number of lexical cohesion ranks the first in both of them; while that ofsubstitution is the last, which is due to the application of repetition, the commonly usedtechnique in writing song lyrics. About the differences, first, the number of reference in ESL is more than that in CSL, which is mainly reflected by the utilizations of personal anddemonstrative reference. The third person pronouns are commonly used in ESL while thefirst and second person pronouns are often used in CSL, which is due to the different way ofthinking resulting from different cultures: mostly, English is from objective angle andChinese from subjective perspective. Moreover, there is no the definite article“the”inChinese while“the”is commonly used in English, which is the biggest difference in usingdemonstrative reference. Second, the number of ellipsis in ESL is less than those in CSLbecause for one thing English is a language of hypotaxis paying attention to forms; whileChinese is a language of parataxis attaching more importance on meaning expression; foranother, song lyrics express much in just a few words since they are timely art and have ashort length. If meaning is clear, ellipsis often occurs in Chinese. Third, the number ofconjunctives in the texts of ESL is far more than that in CSL. Because English bases mainlyon hypotaxis and Chinese mainly on parataxis, English is prone to use explicit conjunctivesbut Chinese tends to use implicit conjunctives.Due to the small corpora and the subjective analysis, the results of this study need to beconfirmed by further researches.