Place Adverbial Chinese-english Discourse Cohesion Function

Based on Halliday’s theory of cohesion, by comparative analysis and statistics methods, this paper makes a survey and contrastive study on the function of textual cohesion of place adverbials in Chinese and English. Through the statistics and comparison, these findings show that both Chinese and English place adverbials not only serve the same function of textual cohesion, but also have the same cohesive types. For example, the place adverbials of both Chinese and English have the functions, such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, lexical cohesion and so on. Some features determine the similarities and differences of textual cohesion of the place adverbials in Chinese and English. They are the textual systematic and the language economy, the consistency of the human mind and the nationality of the language expression, the complexity of Chinese syntax and the unity of English syntax, the symmetry of the Chinese aesthetics and the logic of English aesthetics and Chinese parataxis and English Syntax parataxis. Thus this paper raises some teaching advice for the foreign language teaching workers from the angle of textual cohesion. The teachers need to enhance the awareness of discourse teaching and increase the contents of background knowledge. Otherwise, the findings of this paper play a particularly important role in the listening teaching, so this paper raises some recommendations about teaching process and teaching method.