A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Grammatical Cohesion Between State Of The Union Address And Report On The Work Of The Government

State of the Union Address (SUA) and Report on the Work of the Government (RWG) are important political documents, made by American President and Chinese Premier respectively, both aiming at elaborating political policies. The issue of those two documents will create a sensation worldwide and experts from various countries have made a lot of comparison from different perspectives.Since Halliday and Hasan first proposed cohesion theory in1976, cohesion has become one of the widest research fields in discourse analysis. Within the framework of cohesion theory by Halliday and Hasan, the author takes SUA (1997-2013) and RWG (2006-2013) as the research subjects, makes a comparative discussion of the grammatical cohesion. The author first sets up SUA corpus and RWG corpus, with a sum of100727words and99105words respectively, and then run Antconc to calculate the frequency of different kinds of grammatical cohesive devices. With the help of SPSS, the thesis tries to prove whether there is a significant difference in the use of grammatical cohesion between SUA and RWG It also makes a preliminary exploration to the possible causes for these differences.By comparing SUA corpus and RWG corpus, the major findings are summed up as follows:there is a significant difference in the occurrences of grammatical cohesion and its subcategories.Among the four types of grammatical cohesion, the use of conjunction in RWG is significantly higher than in SUA while the use of reference, substitution and ellipsis is significantly lower, which proves RWG is written in a more formal and precise way. On the one hand, the thesis can help English learners understand SUA and RWG better; on the other hand, it will contribute to provding references for the Chinese-English translation of RWG, which will make the English version more idiomatic and acceptable.