A Contrastive Study Of Reference As A Cohesive Device In English And Chinese Oratorical Texts

Text, or discourse, refers to any piece of spoken or written language which forms a continuity of meaning in certain context without being wholly confined to the syntactic structures. Since the late 1960s and the early 1970s, text analysis, as an effective way of linguistic study, has received growing attention from linguists and flourished ever since. The subject of study for text analysis is the unit above sentence which differs from sentence or clause not in length but in the aspect of cohesion. Naturally, cohesion becomes one of the key notions of text analysis. Halliday & Hasan's theory of cohesion (1976), the most representative achievement in this field, gives a detailed and sufficient account of the English cohesive devices including reference, and has thus aroused a keen interest in cohesion. Reference, as an important type of cohesive devices, refers to the relationship between certain items in a language which can only be interpreted by reference to something else. Reference is of high research value in that it plays a vital role in realizing text coherence and passage transition and makes expression concise and precise.It is noteworthy that in China most of the contrastive discourse studies were conducted on text in its broad sense, and there were few studies applying the theory of text analysis to a specific genre of language. Besides that, studies in this field prefer employing written language as their primary data of analysis rather than spoken language. The present study attempts to use oratorical texts as the data, in the hope that its dual characteristics of both written and spoken modes may help reveal as many similarities and differences between English and Chinese as possible.Based on Halliday & Hasan's theory of cohesion, the thesis uses oratorical text as its data to conduct a quantitative analysis of the English and Chinese reference systems, interprets the findings and explores the problem of the translation of reference.The thesis first traces back into the history of reseaches on cohesion. Achievements of Halliday & Hasan (1976, 1985) abroad, and the development in this field made by Hu Zhuanglin, etc., at home, are briefly reviewed. On the basis of summarizing features of previous studies, characteristics and purposes of the present study are made clear.In the second part of the thesis, several terms closely related to the study are clarified, and reference and its function in oratorical texts, are introduced. In this part, the thesis first distinguishes between two sets of concepts: text versus discourse, cohesion versus coherence, and elaborates on the relationship between cohesion and coherence. Then the thesis introduces the oratorical text and its unique features in the perspective of text analysis, and attempts to define its mode as far as the present study is concerned. The function of reference, especially personal reference, in oratorical texts is discussed in the last section, of this chapter, which paves the way for the intensive studies to come in the next part.As the most important part of the thesis, Chapter Three conducts a detailed and profound investigation of reference in English and Chinese oratorical texts through the methods of illustration and frequency analysis. In addition to personal reference, demonstrative reference and comparative reference, which are the most frequently expounded categories of reference, zero reference is regarded in the analysis as an equally important type of reference, since it is actually a common rule of the Chinese language and demonstrates the most prominent differences between English and Chinese. The study shows that, although all the four types of reference are found in both English and Chinese oratorical texts, they differ a lot in number, usage, frequency, etc. Generally speaking, there are much more reference items in English than in Chinese, while in Chinese, the referential relationship can be more flexibly realized through omission of the reference item or lexical repetition. It is also found that a large number o...