A Contrastive Study On Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese

The late sixties and the early seventies of the last century witnessed the development of text linguistics. As one of the important subjects studied in this study, cohesive devices have attracted the eyeballs of scholars of many countries. In recent decades, contrastive study on cohesive devices has obtained a significant position in contrastive linguistics and promoted the researches in the fields of translation, language teaching and artificial intelligence as well.In this study, we make a detailed comparison of some cohesive devices in English and Chinese, especially those that can be regarded as anaphoras in the widest sense, both in general observation and case studies, and try to analyze the differences grammatically, semantically and cognitively. In general, there are more personal reference, substitution and reiteration other than repetition in English and more ellipsis (especially zero anaphora, ZA for short) and repetition in Chinese. We introduce the theories of grammaticalization, language typology, accessibility and topicality for the interpretation of the differences. As a morphological language, English is subject prominent with higher degree of grammaticalization. The rich forms and strict grammatical rules not only provide precedence for English to use those cohesive devices whose interpretations rely greatly on linguistic presuppositions, especially substitution and ellipsis, and also affect the usage of reference and reiteration in establishing semantic relations. As a semantic language, Chinese is topic prominent with lower degree of grammaticalization, and its cohesion depends largely on non-linguistic presuppositions instead of linguistic ones. Its cohesive devices aren't limited to the use of grammatical rules and their interpretations hardly rely on formal clues. So ellipsis, which is different from its counterpart in English, and repetition become the most popular cohesive devices in Chinese. The wide use of ZA in Chinese even affects the use and the development of pronoun in this language. In fact, compared with English, Chinese pronoun system is under-developed. The pronoun in this language is a marked form expressing complicated accessibility, even pragmatic functions on occasion.Finally, the analysis of this contrastive study is enhanced from micro-level to macro-level with the source of the differences found in the use of cohesive devices traced to the different thinking models of the different nations.