A Contrastive Study Of Cohesion And Coherence In English And Chinese Versions

Discourse Studies characterized by hyper-syntactic analysis, whether from the perspective of Text-Linguistics or from that of Discourse Analysis, is a complicate inter-discipline study, which integrates Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics and Phonetics, as well as involves Rhetoric, Text and Stylistics.Many Chinese scholars have done a great deal of research on facets of Discourse Studies' property, characteristics, framework, development and current state, and they all have received fruitful harvest.However, based on the viewpoint that Discourse Studies' major concerns are acknowledged to be issues of cohesion originated by M. A. K. Halliday & Hasan (1976) and those of coherence proposed by H. G Widdowson (1979), this thesis mainly discusses contrastive study of cohesion and coherence. Although a number of domestic linguistic researchers have contrasted cohesion and coherence in English and Chinese respectively, they have hardly made any researches on the causes of the similarities and differences in cohesion and coherence. Instance of integration of contrastive study of cohesion and coherence is rarely found. Therefore, this thesis is trying to make up the shortages and promote the development of contrastive study of English and Chinese discourses, through integrating contrastive study of cohesion and coherence in English and Chinese. It also intends to discover the similarities and differences in cohesion and coherence by contrasting a good many materials and attempts to analyze the causes of these differences from logical thinking. In addition, it hopes to provide helpful data and inspirations for later researchers in this field.The thesis collects materials from translations of English and Chinese discourses under the guidance of Halliday's functional linguistic theory. It adopts positive method and inductive method, and arrives at the following conclusions by contrasting fifty examples in the thesis: (1): English and Chinese do not have obvious distinction in classification of reference. (2) Difference in substitution is noticeable. This is mainly because English has inflectional changes, while Chinese dose not. (3) Chinese ellipsis focuses on the expression of meaning, overlooking of grammar and logics. English ellipsis is usually marked with formal or morphological tags. (4) The biggest difference in Chinese and English cohesive devices lies in conjunction. (5) The above differences are mainly caused by: Chinese is a language characterized by parataxis, while English is a typically hypotactic language. (6) In fact, the western people would analyse every aspact while they are thinking of something; Chinese people would combine all the separate things into a complete whole in their thinking. As a result, English discourse has linear characteristic while Chinese discourse is spiral. (7) Chinese emphasizes subjective consciousness, and most of its discourses adopt a person as their subjects. English insists on the separation and distinction of the subject and the object, so subjects in its discourse is decided by context.The thesis successfully achieves the objective of integrating contrastive study of cohesion and that of coherence. It logically explains the causes of differences in cohesion and coherence. Such an attempt could offer some helps and inspirations to other researchers who woule be interetsted in this research area. Due to limitations of time and space, the thesis just focuses on grammatical cohesive devices during the process of contrasting cohesion for their representative, that is, reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction.