A Contrastive Study Of Grammatical Cohesive Devices In The Chinese Text And Its English Version Of The Civil Procedure Law Of The People's Republic Of China

In the field of modern linguistics,discourse analysis has gradually developed into an independent discipline since the 1950 s.Discourse analysis,which differs from traditional linguistics,focuses on the connection with context,which helps to understand various coherent discourse.At present,great attention has been paid to discourse analysis by the scholars at home and abroad.Among them,the contrastive analysis of discourse tends to be an angle to conduct their studies.Discourse can be stylistically classified into many types,and legal discourse belongs to one of them.Legal language has the feature of being objective,accurate and rigorous.The studies on the legal language are innumerable,but most of them are conducted in the respect of traditional linguistics,such as words or sentences.There are also some scholars who have tried to make a general summary of the translation strategies and principles,but few scholars have conducted a systematic research on legal texts on the discourse level,especially the cohesion theory.Therefore,directed by the cohesion theory put forward by Halliday and Hasan,this thesis aims to conduct the research on the application of the cohesion theory,especially the grammatical cohesion to the legal texts.Owing to the multi-type of legal language,the thesis merely chooses the Chinese text and its English version of Civil Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China as the research object.Under the guidance of Halliday and Hasan's theory,the thesis conducts a quantitative analysis,attempting to make a contrastive analysis of both the Chinese text and its English version.Based on the study,we find that the third personal references occur frequently in both versions,and conjunction functions equally important in two versions as the most important connective method.However,reference and conjunction are used more frequently in the English translation than those in the Chinese text.There are few substitutions used in the legal texts.Besides,there are some specific structures in the legal texts needs to be noticed.