| In the long-term language study, reference, as a part of the cohesion theory, is mostly employed or studied as a rhetoric device, and few scholars regard it as a kind of specialized language phenomenon to study. In1976, the publication of Cohesion in English by Halliday and Hasan marks the establishment of cohesion theory. Halliday divides cohesion into grammatical and lexical cohesion. Therefrom, reference, as a branch of grammatical cohesion, has received growing attention from linguists.Nevertheless, most of the reference studies are conducted.on literature work, and the analyses on specific genre are relatively rare. This thesis attempts to employ English and Chinese maritime news texts as research objects and makes comparison of reference usage between the two languages, in the hope that it may facilitate text analysis, reading, writing teaching and translation in English and Chinese texts. For the convenience of study, English and Chinese maritime news corpora are built and the data is subject to qualitative analysis. In addition, CLAWS, WordSmith and other tools are used in the research so as to make the output more objective and scientific.Research results show that a large number of reference devices are employed in English and Chinese maritime news texts. However, personal reference is more frequently used in English texts, and comparative reference and demonstrative reference appear more frequently in Chinese texts. Specifically,(1) in the personal references, it is the most widely used, conversely, the word frequency of我们is at the top in Chinese texts. Besides, there is a large number of其appearing in Chinese maritime news, but the most significant difference is the usage of zero reference in Chinese.(2) in the demonstrative reference, the employment of the displays the significant difference between English and Chinese texts. Moreover, there is no corresponding item in Chinese. In addition, this/that and这/那are not necessarily one-to-one.(3) in the comparative reference, the contrastive meaning is realized by virtue of the change in morphology of adjectives and adverbs in English texts. However, Chinese generally expresses contrastive meaning by the lexical and syntactic means. On the basis of above findings, it is hoped that the present research may enrich the studies on reference theory in various texts and provide guidance for teaching and translation of maritime English to some extent. |
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