A Study Of Non-structural Cohesion In Zhao Benshan’s Comic Sketch Texts

As one of the most popular verbal art form in China, comic sketches win popularityand affection of Chinese people with their own special characteristics such as theirhumorous and sarcastic effects while bringing a great deal of laugher to our countryfellows. Among numerous comic sketches, Zhao’s works are undoubtedly the mostprominent ones, which become the indispensable quality program in every Spring FestivalGala representing the development level of Chinese comic sketches. And his sketchlanguage has become the research object of many scholars. Reviewing on the studies ofhis sketch language, it is not difficult to find that most researchers have focused on thehumor of his sketch language and done a lot of comparatively detailed studies of thecognitive mechanism, and rhetorical effect of his sketch language. However, as one of theimportant means to create humor for his comic sketches, cohesion just attracts a littleattention from the linguistic field. Based on this, the discussion of the cohesive devicesused in Zhao’s comic sketch texts is a kind of new trial.In Halliday and Hassan’s cohesion model, cohesion can be divided into structuralcohesion and non-structural cohesion and the latter can be subdivided into grammaticalcohesion and lexical cohesion. The author of the thesis thinks that cohesion plays a veryvital role in construction of Zhao’s comic sketch texts. On the basis of the main fruits ofcohesion of the scholars’ at home and abroad, The thesis tries to study Zhao’s comicsketch texts from the respect of non-structural cohesion and makes an attempt to find outthe role and feature of non-structural cohesion in Zhao’s comic sketch texts.In this thesis, firstly, a brief introduction is made to Zhao’s comic sketch texts andcohesion theory and the importance is attached to Halliday and Hassan’s classificationindicating that the thesis adopts the frame of non-structural cohesion and non-structuralcohesion mainly realized by grammatical and lexical devices. Next, by adopting aqualitative analysis of description, the thesis made detail analysis of grammatical andlexical cohesion in Zhao’s comic sketch texts. Through analysis of specific example, the main findings are demonstrated as following:First, non-structural cohesion can not only effectively link the different parts of thetexts, but also can create some certain comedy effects such as humor and satire；theapplication of the cohesive devices embodies the writer’s controlling ability of language.In some excellent comic sketch texts, there always exists much perfect cohesion.Second, grammatical cohesion mainly contributes to cohesion between sentences andaddition to its cohesive function, lexical cohesion can create some certain rhetoricaleffects.Finally, Lexical cohesion is the most common type of cohesion used in Zhao’s comicsketch texts, which can work out some rhetorical effects and highlight the local feature ofhis comic sketches and enrich cohesive form through using some idioms and the northeastdialect words.The study shows that the cohesion function in Zhao’s comic sketch texts is mainlyrealized by the selection of the linking words, which also contributes to the creating ofcomic effect. The selection of linking words depends on the pragmatic purpose of the textsand the context. However, because of the limited academic scope of the author, theanalysis in the thesis has to be improved and the analysis of mechanism of non-structuralcohesion is not very concrete enough, which is expected to be studied further in the future.