A Contrastive Analysis Of Reference As A Cohesion Device In English And Chinese Texts

Discourse Analysis is a method of language study. It has become an importantfield of language study since its rapid development during late sixties to the earlyseventies of20th century. Discourse analysis often takes language units greater thansentences as the object of study, and researches on the cohesion between sentenceshave become an important aspect of discourse analysis research. The theory of cohesionof Halliday and Hasan (1976) is the most representative theory in the field of cohesionstudy. This theory classified and described five kinds of cohesion, including reference.Reference is the relationship across sentences; it plays an important role on thecoherence of texts.This paper attempts to carry out a comparative text analysis to reveal thesimilarities and differences of references used in English and Chinese recruitingadvertisement texts. By analyzing the similarities and differences in the use of reference,this research tries to compare the similarities and differences existing in two languages,and give explanations from the perspective of language system and the style ofrecruiting advertisement. It is hoped that the findings of this study can provideimplications to translation and teaching practices.Following Halliday and Hasan s theory on cohesion as the theoretical basis, thisstudy takes recruiting advertisement texts as the data for analysis. It adopts bothqualitative and quantitative research methods to answer three research questions:1)How are different types of reference employed in English and Chinese recruitingadvertisement texts?2) What are the similarities and differences in the use of referencesin the English and Chinese data?3) What accounts for the similarities and differencesin the data?The findings of this study show that in the use of reference both similarities anddifferences exist in English and Chinese recruiting advertisements texts. Both Englishand Chinese employ exphoric reference much more than endophoric reference; Thethree types of reference: personal reference, demonstrative reference and comparativereference can be found in both English and Chinese texts, however the reference itemshave difference; within the three types, in the employment of demonstrative reference,both English and Chinese texts put heavier load on near demonstrative items than far demonstrative reference items; Zero referent only appears in the Chinese texts and itincludes the situation of zero personal reference, zero demonstrative reference and zerotopic chain. To give tentative interpretation for the causes of these similarities anddifferences, this paper has compared the similarities and differences in languagesystems between English and Chinese and discussed the writing characteristics ofrecruiting advertisement.This research has made contrastive analysis on reference of English and Chinesetexts. It has revealed similarities and differences in the employment of reference ofEnglish and Chinese recruiting advertisement texts. The finds can be applied in thefield of translation and teaching. The limitation of this research includes the scope ofresearch data is limited and the research questions need further extension.