A Study On The Textual Cohesive Devices Of Hemingway’s Short Stories

As one of the greatest American writers in the 20 th century, Hemingway’s works are being attached great importance to by researchers in the world, they studied the works from different perspectives and have got many profound findings. The studies on Hemingway’s works mainly concentrate on his novels while the studies on Hemingway’s short stories are relatively rare. Hemingway’s short stories are also his excellent works, more and more researchers paid attention to his short stories recently. The studies on Hemingway’s short stories mainly focused on narrative arts, linguistic style, the pragmatic analysis of dialogues in short stories, existentialism, etc. However, few researchers studied his short stories from a perspective of cohesion. The short stories actually have their own special cohesive patterns. Due to this, this thesis concentrated on the following questions from a perspective of cohesion:(1) what are the frequent cohesive devices employed by Hemingway?(2) What are the textual functions of cohesive devices in Hemingway’s short stories?(3) What are the cohesive characteristics in Hemingway’s short stories?(4) How did the frequent cohesive devices used by Hemingway influence his linguistic style? This thesis tried to answer these four questions with the systematical theories of Cohesion in English(published in 1976) by M.A.K. Halliday and Hasan. According to diachronic research, this thesis analyzed the cohesive devices of eight short stories written in different times and tried to find out the cohesive characteristics of the short stories by counting the types of cohesion and analyzing the textual functions. Finally, the effects of the frequent cohesive devices on the formation of the short stories’ linguistic styles were studied basing on the cohesive characteristics of Hemingway’s short stories.The findings of this thesis show that the frequency of each type of cohesive device is much different, the frequency of reference is much higher than that of other types of cohesion, conjunction is next to it, lexical cohesion and ellipsis rank the third and the fourth respectively, and the frequency of substitution is lowest. The cohesive characteristics of Hemingway’s short stories can be found in the textual functions and the frequencies of subtypes of cohesive devices. Exophoras take a high proportion from the perspective of reference; verbal substitution frequently occurs from the perspective of substitution; the frequency of clausal ellipsis is relatively high from the view of ellipsis; the frequency of the conjunctive “and” is the highest in all the subtypes of conjunction and the frequency of repetition is the highest in the subtypes of lexical cohesion. In addition to these, the findings also show that the frequent cohesive devices had a great effect on Hemingway’s vivid language, oral language, plain language, concise language and connotative language.The study on the textual functions of cohesive devices in Hemingway’s short stories provided some good suggestions for applying cohesive theories to the study of literature. And then this thesis also provided some helps for researchers and readers to study or to read Hemingway’s short stories by studying the cohesive characteristics of short stories. Finally, the analysis on the effects of cohesive devices on the formation of Hemingway’s linguistic styles provided a new perspective for studying the linguistic style of literature works.