A Contrastive Study On The Cohesive Devices Of Chinese And English Novels

Language is a complicated symbolic system. Comparison is not only a basic approach to study a phenomenon but also an important method to study linguistics. Due to the fact that language is a complicated symbolic system, we can make comparison at different levels. With the development of contrastive linguistics and with the new achievements of linguistics introduced into the comparative research, the contrastive study has been shifted from the levels of the sentence to the text in the past decades.In 1962, Halliday put forward the concept of cohesion and coherence. The theory of cohesion was set up with the publication of the book Cohesion in English in 1976. In this book, Halliday and Hasan pointed out that cohesion refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it a text. In this book, they classified cohesion into the following five categories: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. The first three categories are expressed through grammar; and the last two categories are manifested through vocabulary. When the interpretation of a certain element in the text depends on another item, cohesive relationship occurs. Since semantic relation may exist within clauses of a sentence, or between sentences, or even in a paragraph or paragraphs, cohesion is generally regarded as a visible network of a text.A Dream of Red Mansions is a marvelous Chinese classical novel written by the greatest novelist Cao Xueqin. It is of extreme value not only in the literature field, but also in the field of linguistics. It is widely acknowledged that A Dream of Red Mansions has fully brought forth the beauty of the Chinese language. There is no doubt that it achieves cohesion in a perfect degree. Among all English versions of the novel, Yang's A Dream of Red Mansions is highly valued by its faithfulness to the original. When reading it, the author is strongly impressed by the similarities and differences of cohesion phenomena of the two versions. The author firmly believes that they are worthy of further research.It is based on this background that the following research is made to examine whether there are some significant differences in the application of cohesive devices between the Chinese classic novel and its English version and at the same time makes a practical application of Halliday & Hasan's cohesion theory to the analysis of a Chinese text. No matter what language is concerned, the exact use of cohesive devices helps to set up cohesion and coherence of a text, and thus in turn helps achieve communicative goals. Undoubtedly, cohesive devices are of great importance for the expressive strength of any language. Thus, the paper also aims to draw some enlightenment on literature translation and EFL teaching field when lexical cohesive devices are concerned.The author has chosen a qualitative and quantitative approach in research. In the beginning, the author chooses enormous examples in both the Chinese and English versions to carry out a contrastive qualitative analysis. Besides, the author chooses Chapter 34 of both versions to carry out a quantitative analysis. Frequencies and distributions of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices in each language are revealed which greatly supports the previous qualitative analysis. Moreover, the reasons for these differences are also further discussed.As for the function of single referential item, one obvious difference in Chinese and English lies in the flexible use of Chinese. Besides, the most noticeable phenomenon with unique Chinese characteristic in the aspect of reference is zero anaphora, which constructs the topic chain. In English, on the other hand, a set of references show up as the reference chain. Explicit reference occurs more frequently in English while Chinese employs more implicit reference. As for substitution, similar items in Chinese are greater in substitutional capacity than those in English since they are with less restriction. Admittedly, certain substitution in Chinese cannot be explained by Halliday's theory. Concerning ellipsis, English always omits predicate but Chinese always omits the subject. Lexical cohesion always takes place in Chinese expression. In English, verbal ellipsis is always followed by clear marks in form. Chinese uses much fewer cohesive devices than English. Conjunctions are different from other grammatical cohesive devices. It could be regarded as both grammatical and lexical devices. More importantly, it focuses on the logical relationship. Due to its clear meaning in the text, it does not depend on the context. The function of it is to indicate the logical relationship and signify certain semantic notion. As for the use of conjunction, the frequency of it is much higher in the Chinese language than in the English language.As for lexical cohesion, generally speaking, there are comparatively more lexical cohesive devices in Chinese than in English. Reiteration is applied much more frequently in Chinese texts than in English. Moreover, there are also different types of repetition in these two languages. Synonym is used more often in English. Another cohesive device, antonym, is more frequently used in Chinese than in English. This is because in Chinese, especially in Chinese literature, pairs of parallel sentences are connected by pairs of antonyms. Whereas in English, such structures are rare and antonyms are often omitted. Besides, there are also some Chinese paratactic antonym expressions that have no equivalent in English. Collocation is a cohesive device, which is quite different from its traditional sense. The readers may find that it is quite easy for them to understand the meaning from the coherent context which pays much attention to collocation. No matter in the Chinese or English version, collocation plays a key role as the lexical cohesive device. There are more collocations in the Chinese language than in the English language.Chinese is a paratactic language, which emphasizes meaning and tends to omit the cohesive devices. English, on the contrary, is a hypotactic language, which emphasizes the completeness of form, to which those explicit items are necessary to make sure the grammatical correctness. This contributes to the differences. The other reason is the difference between the traditional Chinese holistic thinking and western individualistic thinking.Through the research, the author expects that the paper is of some value to EFL teaching and translation.