A Contrastive Study On English And Chinese Cohesive Devices From Hypotaxis And Parataxis

Cohesion in English written by Halliday and Hasan marked the establishment of cohesion theory, and accelerated the development of linguistic study to a higher level, i.e. text analysis. During the past few decades, cohesion and coherence, as the core of discourse analysis, have been a focus of study both at home and abroad. Many scholars attribute the differences of Chinese and English in cohesive devices to the features of hypotaxis and parataxis of English and Chinese languages, about which there are plenty of reservations in this paper. The paper argues that hypotaxis and parataxis play equally important roles in the cohesion and coherence of text, and emphasizes a dialectical method of analyzing the relation between cohesion with hypotaxis and parataxis.Under the framework of Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory, this paper adopts inductive inference to analyze the cohesive devices used in the selected Chinese and English materials, based on Yongsheng Zhu et al’s(2001) comparison of Chinese and English cohesive devices. The paper discusses on the similarities and differences of reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction in Chinese and English texts, and focuses on the manifestitation of these cohesive devices in hypotaxis and parataxis through following Wenguo Pan’s dialectical method.In addition to introduction and conclusion, this paper divides into five chapters. Chapter one makes a brief introduction to theories related to text analysis and cohesion theory, followed by an overview of studies on text cohesion at home and abroad. Chapter two defines hypotaxis and parataxis, and proceeds with a review of current studies on hypotaxis and parataxis in text analysis, achievements and shortcomings included. Chapter three and chapter four form the core of this paper, making a comparison of the four cohesive devices, i.e. reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction, and then a dialectical analysis of their differences in accordance with the linguistic features of hypotaxis and parataxis. Chapter three analyzes the four above-mentioned cohesive devices based on hypotaxis of English and parataxis of Chinese, while chapter four further discusses the manifestation of hypotaxis in Chinese and that of parataxis in English from a dialectical way. Chapter five represents the uniqueness of the paper, focusing on the most distinctive cohesive device in Chinese and English discourses, i.e. ellipsis, and making an interpretation on the basis of Empty Category Principle in syntax.This paper aims, on one hand, to make the study on hypotaxis in English and parataxis in Chinese more comprehensive, objective and scientific through an adoptation of dialectical method in the study, and on the other hand to help translators get a general grasp of the discourse on a macro level to pursue better strategies and a higher quality in their translations.