A Contrastive Research On The Cohesive Devices In English And Chinese Oratorical Texts

Cohesion is one of the key objects in textual analysis. As Halliday and Hasan published the book of Cohesion in English, cohesion theory has attracted the scholars'attention in linguistic and translation field. Many scholars at home and abroad attempt to explore how cohesive devices function in the layout of a text. Cohesion is considered as a necessary condition to constitute textual coherence, so it plays a very important role in translation. This inspires the author to analyze the cohesive devices in oratorical texts in detail from the perspective of text analysis. And the author summarizes translating strategies from a large number of examples.Since the study of contrastive analysis of English and Chinese cohesive devices in the past is mostly based on literal works, the discoveries are not applicable in the special oratorical texts. The oration is characterized by nit-structure, simple language, explicit aim, accuracy. Moreover, the method is qualitative study in the previous study. This thesis analyzes English and Chinese oratorical texts by the way of data-corpus and qualitative as well as quantitative analysis.To ensure the scientificity of research results, the corpus collected shall meet the following three requirements: same or similar topic; speeches of similar length; celebrated authors of similar social status.Through analysis, the author comes to the conclusion as follows. (1) The cohesive devices employed in English oratorical texts are much more than that employed in Chinese oratorical texts under the premise of the same amounts of words in both texts; (2) The employing of each kind of cohesive device is different: in English oratorical texts, substitution < ellipsis < conjunction < reference < lexical cohesion, in Chinese oratorical texts, substitution < conjunction < reference < ellipsis < lexical cohesion. Meanwhile the author summarizes the cohesive characteristics of oratorical texts, which is different from the ordinary texts and explains some reasons accounting for their differences in English and Chinese oratorical texts from the perspective of different language systems and thinking models. And the author proposes some translating strategies based on cohesion.