The Cohesive Features Of China English In Abstracts Of MA Theses By Chinese Postgraduates Of Linguistics

China English has aroused heated discussions among Chinese scholars. And the distinct features of China English have been studied in the past few years. However,its cohesive features have seldom been discussed. This thesis, based on the cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hason(2001), aims to explore the cohesive features of China English in English abstracts of MA theses by Chinese postgraduates of English Linguistics. 60 abstracts are selected from two authoritative corpora, 30 from Chinese Selected Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses(CDMD) of China National Knowledge Infrastructure(CNKI) and the other 30 from Pro-Quest Dissertations & Theses(PQDT). They are further gathered into two corpora on the basis of the nationality of the author, that is, corpus 1– China English abstracts(CEA)and corpus 2– native English abstracts(NEA). Then the data are calculated and tested to present the general favored cohesive devices in CEA and the differences from NEA.The results of the analyses of the data show that lexical cohesion together with reference is much more preferred to conjunction to achieve cohesion and has a dominant frequency of deployment over the other two in CEA. Among subcategories of reference, “the” is absolutely the most favored one. “The” and the third personal reference are used much more frequently than the natives. Next, conjunction is deployed significantly more frequent by Chinese postgraduates. Additive conjunction and temporal conjunction are much more preferred than adversative conjunction and causal conjunction. Also, reiteration has a dominant frequency over collocation among the subcategories of which repetition is the most popular lexical cohesion in CEA. Hyponymy is used a bit more than the native postgraduates. These findings suggest that Chinese postgraduates use conjunction and hyponymy more frequent than the natives do and that they prefer “the” and the third personal reference among the subcategories of reference and temporal conjunction among subcategories of conjunction.Although these findings are helpful for the study of China English, the thesis has some limitations such as a relatively small number of samples and the limitation to the discipline of English linguistics. Therefore, more studies need doing on this aspect.