On Cohesive Devices In Abstracts Of English And Chinese Literature Papers

Since the publication of Cohesion in English(Halliday & Hasan, 1976), research about cohesion has become increasingly popular. Cohesion is studied from different perspectives; however, focus on cohesion in abstracts with contrastive analysis is relatively rare. Besides, Chinese theses also demand English abstracts nowadays, so the language transfer unavoidably occurs. Based on the framework of Halliday and Hasan’s classification of cohesive devices, the author adopted both quantitative and qualitative method to explore the similarities and differences among the three groups, and then language transfer has been testified. The research is to answer the following three questions:1. Which types of cohesive devices are frequently adopted in Chinese abstracts written by native speakers of Chinese(C), English abstracts by native speakers of English(E) and English abstracts by Chinese learners of English(CE)?2. What are the similarities and differences in the use of cohesive devices of the above three groups of users?3. Are there any language transfers by Chinese learners of English(CE)?After this study, some conclusions are drawn:1. The most frequently used cohesive device in abstracts by C is repetition, ellipsis is also used a lot. In abstracts by CE, the demonstrative reference “the” is most often used and Chinese learners of English(CE) always adopt repetition and ellipsis in their abstracts. As for native speakers of English(E), they use a lot of “the” and additive conjunction “and” in their abstracts.2. The usage of reference and conjunction in C is totally different from that in CE and E, while their usages in CE are similar to those in E. Generally speaking, English uses more references and conjunctions than Chinese. The usage of substitution in the three groups is similar to each other, and it is seldom used. In terms of repetition and ellipsis, abstracts by C and by CE are similar to each other. Both of them use these two cohesive deices a lot.3. In some aspects, Chinese learners of English(CE) are affected by their mother tongue which may make their English not so much like native speakers(E)’ or help them learn English more easily. And sometimes they will use English wrongly because of their inaccurate knowledge of English. These are the inter-lingual and intra-lingual transfers.