A Study Of The Use Of Animal Reference Devices In Aesop’s Fables

As one important type of cohesive devices, personal reference plays a significant part in textual cohesion. With the publication of Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion in English(1976), many researchers have been working a lot on cohesive devices. This paper tries to study the cohesive function of animal reference in Aesop’s Fables on the basis of Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory.Based on cohesion theory and corpus linguistics, this paper studies the characteristics of animal references used in Aesop’s Fables. This paper consists of five chapters. Chapter one is the general introduction of the research, including the background of the research, the purpose and significance, research questions and the organization of the paper. Chapter two starts with a literature review on the relevant theories such as, reference, personal reference, and corpus linguistics. Chapter three introduces the methodology adopted in this paper. Chapter four is the findings and discussion. Chapter five is the conclusion and implication of this study. The possibility of further research will also be mentioned in this chapter.The statistics show that compared from the traditional reference theory, fable discourse has its own unique animal reference mode and features. In fable discourse, the noun phrase convergence greatly exceeds the cohesive function of the third personal pronouns, the frequency is higher than the pronoun, and the noun phrase appears in the statistics. In80Aesop’s Fables, coded in1216animals alleged noun phrase referring to appear643times, accounting for52.8%of the amount of the alleged word. According to Halliday and Hasan(1976), first and second person pronouns are endophoric and they are cohesive, but third person is inherently cohesive. The statistics reveal that fable use more noun phrase than third person pronouns. The study shows that there are five animal reference mode in Aesop’s Fables:A+noun…The+noun form, The+noun…The+noun…The noun, A+noun…noun phrase…. personal pronouns, Animal and non-animal, Animal and human.According to the research data generated, the author analyzes the reasons for the use of the characteristics of animals in Aesop’s Fables, mainly by the three-points: cohesion need, low-accessibility, common knowledge.