A Contrastive Study On Reports On Government Work And Their English Versions (2010-2012)from The Perspective Of Cohesion

With the development of text linguistics, the emphasis of linguistic study has shifted from syntactic level to textual level. Cohesion, as one of the important ties in composing a text, has already been the research focus for more and more linguists, among whom Halliday makes a profound contribution to the development of cohesion theory. In Cohesion in English (1976), Halliday and Hasan offer a detailed classification and explanation of cohesion devices in English. In recent decades, some Chinese linguists have also begun their researches on the contrastive studies between Chinese and English cohesive devices. The researches, however, are in a broad sense to some degree. That is, the researches on specific genre, especially the political text, are comparatively insufficient.Based on the findings of previous studies, this thesis construes the analytical framework with the cohesion theory by Halliday and Hasan, takes the annual Reports on Government Work by Premier Wen JiaBao and their English versions as the research subjects, and makes a contrastive discussion of the cohesion devices mainly in a qualitative way, including reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, reiteration, and collocation. In all, this study aims to explore the similarities and differences in the use of cohesion devices between Chinese and English political texts. And it also makes a preliminary exploration to the possible causes for the different frequencies between Chinese and English cohesive devices.The contrastive study on Chinese and English Reports on Government Work from the perspective of cohesion in recent three years indicates that: Firstly, although Chinese and English cohesive devices share the similarity in the classification, these two languages present different preferences when expressing the same meanings. Secondly, Chinese and English are different in the frequency of reference. Chinese, as a paratactic language, prefers to use zero-anaphora; English, as a hypotactic language, employs personal references much more frequently. When it comes to demonstrative reference, both Chinese and English prefer near demonstratives. As for comparative reference, there are not many differences between Chinese and English, except that English enjoys a bit more flexibility. Thirdly, substitution occurs rarely both in Chinese and English Reports on Government Work, whereas ellipses are more frequently adopted as cohesive devices. To be more specific, Chinese prefers the nominal ellipses, while English the verbal ones in some parallel structures. Fourthly, as for conjunction, Chinese prefers to present the relationship between sentences or paragraphs in an implicit way. On the contrary, English always tends to signal the relationship in an unambiguous way, by using a number of conjunctions to illustrate the semantic relations between them. Finally, when it comes to the lexical cohesion, Chinese prefers to use repetition, while English tends to use synonymy, hyponymy or some other cohesive devices.The significance of the study lies in the following aspects. By the discussion of the cohesive devices collected from Reports on Government Work and their English versions, the thesis, to some extent, enriches the research materials for the contrastive studies on Chinese and English cohesion. And the thesis turns out to be a valuable academic practice in the theory application by the employment of cohesion theory to explore the similarities and differences between Chinese and English cohesive devices in a political text. Moreover, by the analysis of a certain quantity of examples, the thesis, to a certain degree, provides the translators who engage in Chinese to English translation involving cohesive devices with some inspiring suggestions.