Analysis Of Cohesive Devices In The English Version Of James Legge’s Mencius

Mencius, as one of the important classics in Chinese Confucian School possesses a great research value. This book records the sayings and deeds of Mencius from372BC to289BC. It has a profound influence on Chinese culture and enjoys a significant status in the world, because the book advocates the political principles and benevolence of kingdom,. In the early19th, the well-known sinologist James Legge began to translate Chinese Classics, including Mencius. The English version gives a clear and complete scripture to the foreigners, which is of great significance in the transmission of Chinese culture.In1962, Michael A. K. Halliday proposed cohesion as one of the main characteristics of discourse, which generally exists in the set of meaning relations. Cohesion can not only distinguish text from non-text, but also it can interrelate the substantive meaning of the discourse. Therefore, Cohesion Theory can help us understand how the discourse is constructed and how language realizes its function on discourse level. And we can be sure that it is necessary to introduce the Cohesion Theory to translation studies. Through such a theory, we can better understand the realization of cohesive devices both in original texts and target texts, which can be undoubted conducive to our understanding of texts.This thesis attempts to probe into Mencius and its translation under the guidance of Cohesion Theory. It targets at analyzing the cohesive devices from the perspective of grammatical cohesion and interpersonal cohesion. Meanwhile, it analyzes how James Legge deals with the implicit cohesion in original text and how these cohesive devices are constructed and related. Finally, the social status and influence about English version are analyzed.After the thorough studies, it can be concluded that James Legge adds a variety of cohesive devices concerning the great discrepancies between Chinese and English, for English emphases hypotaxis while Chinese pays more attention to parataxis. As for grammatical cohesion, due to the omission of subjects and zero reference, the construction of reference plays an indispensable role in cohesion. Though Chinese and English share the similar classification of substitution, the substitution in English is usually replaced by reiteration in Chinese. Besides, a large number of conjunctions are used by James Legge to form cohesive ties. As for interpersonal cohesion, English and Chinese have some similar mood cohesion devices, including parallelism mood, subject chain and adjacency pairs. However, modality cohesion is realized through adding some related modals by James Legge. After this analysis, we come to realize that cohesive devices are of great significance for constructing discourse meaning, which function as a bridge between the writer of the source language and the readers of the target language.The present study elevates reader’s understanding of James Legge’s translation of Mencius, enriching the translation studies of this book, spreading the transmission of Confucius culture, and finally enhancing the cultural communication between the East and the West. Besides, this study can also help us further identify the similarities and differences between English and Chinese cohesive devices, thus enhancing our cohesion awareness.