A Comparative S Tudy Of Chinese And English Cohesive Devices Employed In The Political Documents From The Perspective Of SFL

Speech activities and text all need clear ideas and coherently words to express the meaning. Text is the basic unit of language, cohesive is a common feature and the necessary condition for the formation of the text and it is also one of the most effective means for translation analysis. With the development of text linguistics, the emphasis of linguistic study has shifted from syntactic level to textual level. Cohesion, as one of the important ties in composing a text, has already been the research focus for more and more linguists, among whom Halliday makes a profound contribution to the development of cohesion theory. In Cohesion in English(1976), Halliday and Hasan offer a detailed classification and explanation of cohesion devices in English. In recent decades, some Chinese linguists have also begun their researches on the contrastive studies between Chinese and English cohesive devices. There searches, however, are in a broad sense to some degree. That is, the researches on specific genre, especially the political text, are comparatively insufficient.This thesis, based on the findings of previous studies, makes an attempt to investigate the cohesive devices employed in the Government Work Report in both their Chinese and English versions systematically and in detail. Within the framework of cohesion theory by Halliday and Hasan, the author, takes the Government Work Report(2012-2014) and their translated English counterparts as the research subjects, makes a contrastive discussion of the cohesion devices mainly in a qualitative way. On the whole, this thesis aims to analyze the similarities and differences in the application of cohesion devices in the Chinese Government Work Report and the translated English versions as well. And it also makes a preliminary exploration to the possible causes for these differences between Chinese and English cohesive devices.