A Contrastive Study On Lexical Cohesive Devices Of Hongloumeng And Its English Version A Dream Of Red Mansions

In modern linguistics, contrastive linguistic study has shifted its focus from sentence level to text. In an attempt to reveal the respective characteristics of cohesion of Chinese texts and English texts, based on the cohesion theory promoted by Halliday and Hason, the author of the thesis makes systematical contrastive study on lexical cohesive devices used in the famous Chinese novel Hongloumeng and its English version A Dream of Red MansionsAccording to cohesion theory, certain lexical items generate cohesive force in texts by their reiteration or collocation relations. Reiteration relation contains devices of repetition, synonym, superordinate, and general word; while collocation devices include antonym, words drawn from ordered series, and lexical chains. Employing both quantitative and qualitative analysis methods, the author systematically compares these lexical cohesive devices used in Hongloumeng and its English translation, illustrating their similar cohesive effect and respective differences.The contrastive study reveals that: Lexical cohesive devices of Hongloumeng and A Dream of Red Mansions generate basically the same intra-sentence and inter-sentence cohesive effects. But different characteristics of Chinese and English also lead to the existence of distinctions. In general, the number of lexical cohesive devices of the Chinese version is more than that of the English version. Specifically, repetition, antonym, and ordered series words are adopted more frequently in Chinese texts than in English, while synonyms more often in English, but just in a respectively slight degree. Apart from frequency, the forms of repetition, synonym and antonym are not completely equivalent.This study will not only deepen our understanding of cohesion phenomena in both Chinese and English, but also prove to be of certain value to EFL teaching, and Chinese - English translation work as well.