A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Cohesive Devices In Fortress Besieged

This paper gives a detailed analysis of different cohesive devices which appear in both Chinese and English versions of the book Fortress Besieged. It tries to compare the similarities and differences of cohesive devices in two different languages and lead to an in-depth discussion of the basic characteristics of Chinese and English.'Cohesion'is an important concept in the organization of the message. It refers to the linguistic devices by which the speaker can signal the coherence of the text. The analysis of discoursal contrast is a result of the growing need for linguistic analysis beyond the sentence level. As for the achievement of textual consistency, Chinese differs from English co-texts in cohesive devices.This paper aims to exemplify a variety of research spaces in this terrain. From a methodological perspective, different aspects of the field are explored through a number of lenses including cohesion in discourse translation that incorporates target responses to the original, the longitudinal tracing of change and development, a corpus-based exploration of disciplinary difference in the grammatical construction of evaluation of cohesive devices in English and Chinese literature texts of Fortress Besieged. Theoretical perspectives include genre theory and systemic functional linguistics. In applying particular research lens and theoretical framework, each chapter illuminates different dimensions of texts and contexts.Contrastive studies in literature discourse represent an expansive research terrain in terms of contexts as well as theoretical and methodological approaches. The methods used in this paper include comparison and contrast, induction and deduction, statistical procedures. Materials are mostly from Fortress Besieged which is translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao.This essay has only scratched the surface of the problem of cohesion and traversed a very small section of the field of comparative linguistics. It is open to criticism and suggestions.