A Contrastive Study Of Lexical Cohesive Devices In University Commencement Speeches Between English And Chinese

In today’s knowledge-based economy, college education has also been more and more attentive, andthen university commencement speeches (UCS) appear in this situation. UCS is the last “Life Lesson” forcollege students during college, which is of great significance. Therefore, based on the classification oflexical cohesion proposed by M.A.K. Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan, Michael Hoey, Hu Zhuanglin, ZhuYongsheng and Zheng Lixin and so on, this research sums up and regards two categories or eightsubcategories of lexical cohesive devices as research framework. This study takes15English UCS and15Chinese UCS made by various celebrities at commencement in universities (i.e., the bilingualcorresponding textual corpora) between2005and2013as research corpora and adopts qualitative method,quantitative method and contrastive analysis to contrast and analyze English-Chinese lexical cohesivedevices in these20English and Chinese UCS (10English UCS and10Chinese UCS) and show theimportance of lexical cohesive devices in English and Chinese UCS. In the past, the contrastive study oflexical cohesive devices in English and Chinese mostly took literature as the research corpus, and therewere fewer contrastive studies of lexical cohesive devices in English and Chinese practical writings.This study has designed three research questions:(1) What lexical cohesive devices are there inEnglish and Chinese UCS?(2) What are the similarities and differences in using cohesive devices inEnglish and Chinese UCS?(3) What are the major causes for similarities and differences of lexicalcohesive devices in English and Chinese UCS?This thesis is divided into five parts.Chapter One is a general introduction to the study, which mainly overviews the research motivation,research significance, research objectives and main structure of the present study.Chapter Two is literature review, including the review of classification of lexical cohesive devicesproposed by domestic and foreign scholars, which briefly introduces the classification of lexical cohesivedevices, especially the classification of M.A.K. Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan, Michael Hoey, Hu Zhuanglin,Zhu Yongsheng and Zheng Lixin and so on, and this chapter also reviews the research status of publicspeeches at home and abroad. Chapter Three presents the research design, mainly including research questions, corpus collection andclassification, research methods and research procedures, as well as the classification of English andChinese lexical cohesive devices used in this thesis.Chapter Four is the core part of this study. According to the classification of lexical cohesive devicesproposed by scholars at home and abroad, summarize the classification of lexical cohesive devices adoptedin this research, take which as the research framework to identify the frequency of each lexical cohesivedevice and contrast similarities and differences in lexical cohesive devices in English and Chinese UCS, inwhich repetition and other collocation occupy the large proportion in both discourses, and other lexicalcohesive devices in Chinese and English UCS also have similarities and differences. The research selects alarge number of examples from English and Chinese UCS made by celebrities to demonstrate what lexicalcohesive devices there are in English and Chinese UCS and similarities and differences in the distributionand frequency of lexical cohesive devices, and explore the reasons for these similarities and differences inthe distribution, combined with the characteristics of UCS and features of English and Chinese.Chapter Five is the conclusion, which summarizes the major findings of this study and defines thesignificance and value of contrastive study of lexical cohesive devices in English and Chinese UCS.Meanwhile, it summarizes the limitations of this study as well as some suggestions for future study.In conclusion, this study for the first time studies the similarities and differences in Chinese andEnglish using lexical cohesive devices in Chinese and English bilingual corresponding textual corpora,which will is conductive for speakers and audience to understanding English and Chinese speeches better,make speeches more persuasive and make speakers and audience understand the importance of lexicalcohesion in university commencement speeches. In addition, this study provides a new research approachfor the contrastive study of lexical cohesive devices, and this study provides useful reference for theresearch of public speaking at the aspects, such as writing, teaching and learning.