| Recent years saw linguists in various fields shift their focus from the level ofwords and sentences to that of discourse analysis. However, the research on lexicalcohesion is far from enough. According to Michael Hoey (1991:10), the lexicalcohesive devices account for42%of all the cohesive ties in the sample texts offeredby Halliday and Hasan. Therefore, the lexical cohesion actually plays a leading part indiscourse cohesion and coherence.Halliday (1976:274) generally designates “reiteration†and “collocation†as thetwo typical realizations of lexical cohesion. Hu Zhuanglin (1994:115), in hismonograph—Discourse Cohesion and Coherence, expands the lexical cohesivedevices into five categories: repetition, general word, similarity, relation andcollocation. Moreover, the “similarity†has three sub-categories, i.e. synonymy,near-synonymy and antonym; the “relation†can also be divided into hyponymy,part-whole relation, collectivity and consistency.For the convenience of Chinese-English contrastive study, and in accordancewith Zhu Yongsheng, Zheng Lixin, Miao Xingwei’s book, A Contrastive Study ofCohesion in English and Chinese, this thesis conducts its research based on five sub-categories of the above lexical cohesive devices: repetition, synonymy, antonymy,hyponymy and collocation.In order to minimize the inaccuracy in contrastive study, the data that share thesame contents are always more preferable. As a result, the original text and itstranslation are often selected as study corpus, among which the self-translated workscan also be seen. The famous scholar Tanquiero regards self-translation as more faithful to the original text (Tanquiero,2000:65). In June,2009, the book TheoreticalStudy of Translation Based on Self-translation Corpus: Exemplified by EileenChang’s Self-translated Works was published by the Chinese Social Science Press.Through penetrating contrastive analyses of Chang’s original Chinese works and theirEnglish translation, the book has proved that the study on self-translation is of greatsignificance to the improvement of translation.This thesis consists of five chapters: introduction, literature review, theoreticalfoundation, contrastive analysis and conclusion.Chapter one deals with the research background, significance and layout of thethesis.Chapter two is a review of the development of the lexical cohesion theory as wellas the previous contrastive study of lexical cohesion in English and Chinese.Chapter three elaborates the theoretical foundation of this thesis and mainlyconcentrates on the five sub-categories of lexical cohesive devices, namely, repetition,synonym, antonym, hyponymy and collocation.Chapter four is the key part of this thesis, focusing on the contrastive analysis oflexical cohesive devices of Eileen Chang’s novels in both Chinese and Englishversions. In each of the five lexical cohesive devices, the similarities between Chineseand English are discussed on two levels—within sentence and across sentences; thenthe dissimilarities are explored from various perspectives in the last part of eachlexical cohesive device.Chapter five is the conclusion of the thesis. |
