A Comparative Study Of The Cohesive Devices In Mrs. Dalloway And Pride And Prejudice

What is typical of the stream of consciousness narration is that it discards the traditional form and structure, centering on the windings and changes of mind to present the process of thinking. Mrs. Dalloway, a. masterpiece of stream of consciousness novels by Virginian Woolf, reveals the fear of death and the sense of being alienated of modern westerners. It is known for its notorious difficulty for people to understand. Pride and Prejudice, one of the masterpieces of Jane Austen, a realist writer, states what a happy marriage is through several couples' love experiences. Since its publication, it seizes a wide readership all over the world.Mrs. Dalloway has been studied from different perspectives. It is studied from literary criticism, which lays emphasis on the character image analysis. It is studied from Stylistics and it is found that the writing of Woolf is rich in indirect discourse. There are also some studies that have been done on Pride and Prejudice. It is studied from literary criticism, focusing on the characterization, language, theme, and social background.This thesis employs cohesion theory put forward by Halliday and Hasan to make a comparison of cohesive devices between the two novels, with the intention to show how the different styles of writing are linguistically realized. Cohesion, as an important part of textuality, expresses the continuity that exists between one part of the text and another. A semantic unity of a text lies in the cohesion among the sentences of which it is composed.This thesis is divided into six parts. Part 1 is the introduction of the topic of this thesis and the motivation. Part 2 is the literature review of cohesion, including the development of this theory and the studies that have been done at home and abroad. A review of the studies on the two novels is also included in this part. Part 3 is the survey of the theory of cohesion. Part 4 is the statistics of cohesive devices in the two excerpts with respect to reference, ellipsis and substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Comparison of the cohesive devices used in the two excerpts is made. Part 5 is the interpretation of the analyses made in chapter 4. Part 6 is the conclusion.Through the analysis, we get the results:In Pride and Prejudice, anaphoric references construct explicit cohesive relations with their presupposed items. If the distance between the referred and the referring is remote, we can find intermediate references between them. Whenever ambiguity would be produced by references, they would be avoided. Conjunctives construct an immediate relation with the sentences that immediately go before, with the help of anaphoric comparative references, different parts of the novel are closely connected as a whole. The reiteration of same words and the collocation chains work together to make the text a coherent one. They all together construct a dense texture. When readers go through this novel, it is easy for them to retrieve the lost information, and the cohesion among different parts makes reading go smoothly.In Mrs. Dalloway, the imaginary texture and loose texture makes the comprehension of the novel time-consuming and difficult. The relation between the reference and its presupposed items is vague and sometimes ambiguous; the distance between the conjunctive and its semantically relevant part is relatively remote; some seemingly unrelated collocation chains interweave with the key collocation chain. All this is suggestive of the flowing of the consciousness, but at the same time brings difficulty to understanding on the part of the reader.