A Comparative Study Of Lexical Cohesion And Text Aboutness In The Economist And The Beijing Review

Lexical cohesion, a term first coined by the British linguist Halliday and Hasan in the 1970s, is correlated with co-extensional links between linguistic items. As an indispensable component of the theory of cohesion, lexical cohesion has been received with more favor in the field of functional linguistics in recent years. Halliday even views lexical cohesion as an imprescindible pattern of relation in the text-forming mechanism and regards reiteration and collocation as complementary counterparts, the former being repetition of lexical items and synonymous occurrences in referential context and the latter the association of lexical items that regularly co-occur.Since the 21st century, the world has witnessed a rapid economic development in China, which is attributed to accelerated implementation of the reform and opening-up policy proposed in the 1970s. The increasingly frequent governmental communication and exchange between China and England has propelled in great force non-governmental activities in differing forms and has greatly deepened mutual understanding. Accompanied by the quick development in domestic context, topics concerning economic issues and foreground for further achievements have taken the predominant position in all respects. Economic discourses accordingly constructed in disparate modes of thinking and endowed with conspicuous characteristics are attracting more attention from people in these two countries. As the ramification of economic evolution, economic discourses crank up warm interests among numerous scholars.Based on 40 economic reports derived from 2014 to 2015 (20 discourses collected from The Beijing Review and 20 discourses collected from The Economist, both of which are embodied in the title of big data era and macroeconomic regulation and control), the study conducts a contrastive analysis, which probes into recurrent nuclei in regard of thematic meanings in Sino-British economic discourses from the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar and the theory of lexical cohesion. Three major questions are addressed in line with text structure:(1) What are the differentiations of discourse types manifested in Sino-British economic discourses? (2) What are the underlying reasons for asymmetric distributions of recurrent nuclei between headlines and the remaining texts? (3) In what propensities do strategies of constructing headlines and main bodies adopted by authors of the two countries get visualized? It would not be difficult, based on statistics and emblematic exemplifications to draw the conclusions:In terms of discourse types, there are huge differences between The Beijing Review and The Economist, with category three underlining recurrent nuclei bearing low frequency and category four highlighting none repetition emphasized. Moreover, British newspapers, taking The Economist as an example, give full expression to the strategy of construction in headlines, which felicitously explains asymmetric manifestations. In regard of Transitivity involved, material process, in spite of subtle nuances embodied find extensive distributions in leads across the two newspapers. Strategies of proposition splitting and replication of logic relations, in the meantime are frequently employed in composing headlines of economic discourses, which sets sound references for further researches combined.