A Contrastive Study On Textual Cohesion Of Chinese And English And Its Meanings To Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

Guided by Systemic Functional Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics, using andborrowing ideas from the Cohesion Theory of Halliday and Hasan, applying thestatistic analysis and empirical approach of Corpus Linguistics, this thesis makes amore comprehensive research on cohesive devices in Chinese and English discoursefrom both explicit and implicit aspects by combining qualitative and quantitativeanalysis. The whole thesis is made up of six parts:The ifrst part is introduction. This part sorts out the related researchachievements in the textual cohesion，the contrastive study on textual cohesion ofEnglish and Chinese and the textual error in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Languageof many predecessors in details. Then，it deifnes the research signiifcance andmethods of this thesis.The second part is the contrastivestudy on explicit cohesion. Based on theParallel Corpus of Chinese and English，in terms of semantic relations and lexicalrelations, this part makes a contrastive analysis on the differences and similarities inexplicit cohesive devices in Chinese and English discourse. It concludes that there arevarious differences in Chinese and English discourse with regard to the usage onexplicit cohesion. Moreover, it summarizes that the source of the discrepancy is thedifferences of the parataxis and hypotaxis, Topic-Prominence andSubject-Prominence.The third part is the contrastive study on implicit cohesion. From the aspects ofcultural context, knowledge system, conversational principles, sequence loconicityand metaphor, this part makes a contrastive analysis on the differences and similaritiesin terms of implicit cohesive devices in Chinese and English discourse separately. Itconcludes that there are various differences in Chinese and English discourse asregards to the cultural context and conversational principles. However, it has littledifferences in knowledge system, sequence loconicity and metaphor.What’s more，itsummarizes the differences in cultures and thinking patterns is the primary cause ofthe discrepancy in the usage of implicit cohesive devices in Chinese and Englishdiscourse in terms of cultural context and conversational principlesThe forth part is the contrastive study on the orientation of using in cohesivedevices in Chinese and English discourse. It sets the four works of modern andcontemporary literary with Chinese-English parallel texts as the Corpus, dividing the cohesive devices into two parts: explicit cohesion and implicit cohesion. Based onfrequency statistics and frequency adduct statistics, this part makes a contrastive studyon the orientation of using separately in cohesive devices in Chinese and Englishdiscourse. It concludes that English tends to use explicit cohesive devices more thanChinese. And Chinese tends to use Reference, Ellipsis and Repetition while Englishtends to use Reference，Conjunction and Substitution. It summarizes that the maincause of the differences orientation of using in cohesive devices in Chinese andEnglish discourse is the difference in linguistic style of discourses, linguistic formsand the cultural differences between China and the West.The iffth part is error analysis and teaching implication. According to theEnglish-speaking Students’ writing papers with cohesive error, which from theDynamic Corpus of Writing Papers from HSK as corpus, this part concludes that theEnglish-speaking St’udents writing in Chinese tend to make error in Reference，Conjunction and Repetition in terms of explicit cohesion and the error which causesof implicit cohesion devices are affected by context and sequence loconicity. From theaspects of learners, it comes up with the methods of reading and writing to enhancethe self discourse awareness of English-speaking Students. From the perspective ofteaching, it suggests ifve teaching implications, namely, externalizing the implicitcohesion，showing the best example for articles, cloze, error comment and errorcorrection.The last part is the conclusion, including the results and shortcomings of thethesis.