| Nowadays, more attention has been paid to children’s education, and it is well-known that in the early age, fairy tales contribute a lot to their further cognitive development. Among all of them, the fairy tales, written by H. C. Andersen undoubtedly win a wide reputation, attracting many a scholars’attention both at home and abroad since their first publication in1916. At present, researches on Andersen Fairy Tales have been increasing gradually, while few of them have taken perspective from discourse and lexical cohesion.The study of this paper is mainly based on Halliday’s lexical cohesion and general words theory. According to it, the general words in Andersen Fairy Tales are classified into seven types. The research is mainly carried out in the following procedures. Firstly, the author selects60articles on different topics from Andersen Fairy Tales translated by Jean Hersholt and inputs them carefully into the computer. Next, after the training of coding and tagging from professor Yu, the author codes all the texts together with two postgraduates until the results come into an agreement. Then this paper displays all the distribution and percentage of each type of general words with the software Antconc and SPSS. At last, it gives examples and discussion on some typical phenomenon of general words adoption. In addition, the characteristics of general words in Andersen Fairy Tales are concluded, which is beneficial for the teaching and learning in literature articles. Meanwhile, to some certain extent, it can reduce the comprehension difficulty in children’s interpretation of fairy tales.The results could include:(1) In the light of the analyses of overall characteristics of general words in Andersen Fairy tales, the general words account for21.03%of the total words implying that the general words function as an important part in Andersen Fairy Tales.(2) And there are28kinds of human animate noun as general words in the corpus and their percentage in all the7types of general words is44.1which makes up less than half of all the general words.(3) Contrary to the human animate noun, nonhuman animate noun occupies only7.9. Among it, the most frequently used words are "flower" as a symbol of happiness and sweetness just like kids’childhood used as its general conception or some relative implied meaning from it.(4) As for inanimate concrete words, its total number is419and is made up of13kinds of different words. The specific interpretation of this kind of words must rely on its context.(5) Inanimate abstract words are most difficult part because of their abstract expression. So is in Andersen Fairy Tale, these words can contain all the moments forming from the most usual things to the most unusual and rare things around people.(6) While action noun mainly express the action or process, and most of them are formed by nominalization. Sometimes they express a general conception and sometimes they narrow down their general meaning and refer to something specific.(7) With regard to the fact noun, they are usually used to express the author’s opinion. In addition, they are expression to the nature of things and a general judgment about some events.(8) Locational noun can not only refer to a broad position appropriate for something but also focus on its implied meaning.Besides, the author makes a conclusion on the characteristics of general words in Andersen Fairy Tales. Firstly, one of their primary peculiarity is the function of reference. In Andersen Fairy Tales, general words are frequently used to regard to the object mentioned in previous part in discourse with the purpose of avoiding the simple repetition of deictic words. This phenomenon can be called anaphora which is put forward by Halliday&Hasan(1976). Secondly, low accessibility is also a typical characteristic of general words. In Andersen Fairy Tales, the information revealed by general words is extensive. So a large amount of efforts are required to pay in their way of fairy tale discourse comprehension which is a typical representation of low accessibility. Thirdly, just as its name implies, the characteristic of high generalization is a symbol for the general words. To a certain extent, they almost cover all the other words in this part and cannot be materialized into some certain type. Fourthly, both openness and attitudinal trait are significantly embodied in Andersen Fairy Tales. The features of openness means the adoption of general words are freely and far beyond the limitation of some grammar rules. As for the attitudinal trait it suggests that the general words can be applied by the author’s attitude and sometimes can be modified by some other words. Last but not the least, the typical feature of general words is in-equivalence, the action noun are used to express a process or state thus in most cases the objects referred by them can not be clearly recognized. This kind of phenomenon is called inequivalence.In a word, apart from the descriptive and interpretation of general words, the important achievement of this thesis is the conclusion of its characteristic. It is believed that this kind of research on general words from the angle of lexical cohesion can provide some helpful references for the English fairy tales writing and translating, which will be favorable to children. |
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