A Contrastive Study Of Lexical Cohesion In The Chinese And English Versions Of Red Sorghum

The publication of Cohesion in English in 1976 written by Halliday and Hasan witnesses the important role of lexical cohesion played in the cohesion of a text. Based on the cohesion theory of Halliday and Hu Zhuanglin, this thesis analyzes the lexical cohesion in the famous novella Red Sorghum and its translation version. We reclassify the specific devices into repetition, synonymity, taxonomic relationship, general word, antonomity and lexical chain. Among them, the first four are reiteration and the latter two are collocation on a higher level.The thesis presents a qualitative study that quotes several representative examples from Red Sorghum in order to explain the usage of the devices and their roles in cohesion in the original and the target text and a quantitative study that counts up the total number and percentage of devices used in all the 9 chapters of Chinese and chapter 5 and chapter 6 of English versions in order to highlight the contrast of the similarities and differences, aiming to find out the reasons for that.Some findings have been made based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the six types of lexical cohesive devices. Firstly, repetition is the highest using frequency device in both versions. Almost every chapter of Red Sorghum describes the current situation and the memory of Douguan, repetition is used to connect reality and memory and reveal and deepen the distinguishing features of characters. But the type of repetition in English is less than that of Chinese for there is no antithesis and anadiplosis. Secondly, more synonymity is employed in English than Chinese does because English belongs to the synthetic-analytic language which places emphasis on the morphological changes of lexical items. It forms long distance cohesion in English while short distance in Chinese. Thirdly, antonym takes the largest number and proportion in the group of antonymity relationship since English basically translates antonym of Chinese word-for-word. In addition, Chinese uses more the same series device while English more complementary because Chinese focuses on the orderliness generated from rhythm and antithesis while English on the diversity of vocabulary. Finally, lexical chains constitute vigorous long distance cohesion and most of them are verb chains. Moreover, it should be noting that English has no corresponding lexical devices to translate the Chinese-style items. Because these kinds of items either are created by the original author according to the need of the story or imply the cohesive function in them. This is a feature of Chinese usage.The author hopes this paper will benefit the further study of the application of lexical cohesion in other texts.