A Contrastive Study Of The Cohesive Devices Applied In Chinese And American College Students’ English Speeches

The publishing of cohesion in English co-authored by Halliday and Hasan in1976 firstly made introductions of the cohesive theory to the public,and soon it attracted the attention of many linguists and became the research focus in terms of linguistics and translation fields.From then on,the analysis of cohesive theory and cohesive devices has become one of the major research objectives in discourse analysis.There are abundant scholars from home and abroad making contributions to the development of cohesive theory and intend to explore the function of cohesive devices in terms of coherence of the text.The author carried out a contrastive analysis of the application of cohesive devices in Chinese college students’ English speeches and American college students’ English speeches.What’s more,the cohesive theory put forward by Halliday and Hasan is adopted as the theoretical foundation of this study.The final goal is to analyze the differences of the cohesive devices applied in English speeches delivered by Chinese college students and American college students and explore the main causes underlying them.What’s more,a corpus of 30000 words is built up aim to guarantee the validity of this study.The corpus consist of 30 speeches,including 15 English speeches represented by top three winners who participates “CCTV” Cup National English Speaking Contest from the year of 2012 to 2017 and 15 English speeches represented by top three participants of National English speech Contest of the same period,which was organized by American Speech Association.Different types of cohesive devices are marked and a statistical science tool Word Smith is applied to compute the frequencies of the employment of different types of cohesive devices during the analyzing procedures.The study indicates that there are several differences between the application of cohesive devices in Chinese college students’ English speeches and American college students’ English speeches.First of all,Chinese college students prefer to employ first personal reference and second personal reference compared with American college students do.It is deeply related with Chinese college students’ strategy which is forcefully influenced by the Chinese thinking mode.Secondly,the contribution of substitution and ellipsis used in Chinese college students’ English speeches is much lower than that in American college students’ English speeches.The sharper contrast can be seen from the distribution of clausal substitution and ellipsis.Thus,the authorfound that it may be related to different English competence revealed by Chinese college students and American college students by further analyzing.Thirdly,Chinese college students have a strong tendency of using few simple forms of conjunctive words.Finally,when it comes to the application of lexical cohesive devices,the repetition occupies nearly seventy percent of all lexical ties in Chinese and is also more frequently employed by Chinese college students.It is clearly indicated that there are two main causes underlying these discrepancies: different strategy adopted by Chinese college students and American college students respectively which is strongly influenced by cultural conventions and the thinking mode of Chinese college students;and Chinese college students’ English competence imperfections.In short,some suggestions are proposed by the author through the further analysis.First of all,Chinese college students are supposed to make a balance between the personal experiences and objective statistics to increase the objectiveness of the text.On the other hand,Chinese college students should pay more attention to lessen the uncontrolled employment of repetition in their English speeches.Lastly,English competence should also be focused and improved.