A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Cohesive Devices In Vanity Fair And Yang Bi’s Chinese Translation

With the development of the research of the text, linguistic studies began to expand their studies to the textual level. In 1976, Cohesion In English was published, which marked a new phase that text research had reached. Cohesion devices, as vital parts in a text, play an important role in consisting text. In Cohesion In English, Halliday and Hasan classified the cohesive devices into two categories, grammatical cohesive devices and lexical cohesive devices.Vanity Fair, the masterpiece of British realism novelist William Thackeray, is welcomed for hundreds of years. Both its stylistic features and its content are highly spoken of. Yang Bi’s Chinese translation has been praised since it was published. In this translation, Yang pays attention to the characteristics of cohesive devices between English and Chinese all the time, and adopts cohesive devices conforming to the habits of target language so that the translation can be fluent, coherent and bring readers the feeling of reading the original book.Based on the theory of cohesion of Halliday and Hasan, this thesis compares and analyzes the similarities and differences between four kinds of grammatical cohesive devices by taking the Vanity Fair and Yang Bi’s Chinese translation as linguistic data. The four kinds of grammatical cohesive devices include:reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. By comparison, the author firstly concludes the reasons causing the differences of grammatical cohesive devices between English and Chinese. Secondly, translators can choose right cohesive devices in English-Chinese translations eventually to achieve the text cohesion and coherence. Therefore, the thesis can deepen the readers’ understanding of the differences between English and Chinese and has a significant meaning in assisting translators to choose appropriate translating methods.This thesis includes five chapters. Chapter one includes the background, the purpose and the researching methods of the thesis. Chapter two is the literature review. The basic research productions at home and aboard are analyzed as well as the content and linguistic features in Vanity Fair and its Chinese translation. Chapter three mainly presents the definition of the text and cohesion and the classifications of cohesion devices by Halliday and Hasan. Chapter four is the main part. It studies the four kinds of grammatical cohesive devices by comparison, and then concludes the similarities and differences between English and Chinese. The last chapter is the conclusion. It introduces the practical value and limitations of this thesis.