| Contrastive analysis (CA) is a very important concept in linguistics. It means thecontrast of two or more languages (such as mother tongue and target language). Thepurpose is to forecast and explain the mistakes and difficulties during the process oflanguage acquisition (Z. Harris,1952). As a major method of linguistic research, thoughthe CA has gone through doubts and criticisms, it gets people’s attention again with thedevelopment of linguistics. Cohesion is another important concept in the field ofdiscourse analysis and text linguistics. As the basic method to hold the text together,cohesion, beyond all questions, is vital for understanding a text. In the book Cohesion inEnglish (1976), Halliday and Hasan first applied the term:“text cohesion”, which waswidely accepted in the following studies in this field. The strong interest in the study ofcohesion has been inspired by since then. Sport news discourses, as a sub-variety of thenews discourses has found its importance because increasing number of people showtheir interest in it and it is firmly linked with our daily life. Among various kinds of newsreporting, sports news occupied a prominent position in modern society for its popularity,especially during important sport event such Olympic Games and the World Cup.Although the research on news discourse is becoming increasing popular, the study onsports news is limited. However, the detailed linguistic research on the sports news isalmost cannot be found in recent years.This thesis attempts to make a contrastive research on cohesive devices inChinese and English Sports news reporting based on the framework of Halliday andHasan’s cohesion theory with the aid of statistics method. Apart from the theoretical basis,there is no doubt that this process needs the support of a collection of news discourses.20Chinese sports news are selected from Xinhua net and20English ones are selected fromCNN and other authoritative press. Firstly, all the cohesive ties have been collected andmarked according to Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory; Secondly, an elaborateanalysis has been made to find the major similarities and differences between the twolanguages in this field; Thirdly, the implications of the study has also been discussed by the author.The findings of the thesis are as follows. The similarities of cohesion in Englishand Chinese sports news discourse:1) Reference and conjunction are the most commonlyused, especially personal reference, demonstrative reference and additive conjunction.2)Comparative reference and substitution are rarely used in both and not a single verbal andcausal ellipsis is found.3) Lexical cohesion reflects its importance and a good-sizedproportion of the lexical cohesive ties can be found in both. The differences are obviousas the research shows:1) The number of personal reference, demonstrative reference andconjunctions in English is much larger those that in Chinese2) There are more ellipsis inChinese than that in English.3) In Chinese sports news discourse, the use of “这（个）”is larger than its equivalent in English “this”. However,“that” in English is much morecommonly used than “那（个）” in Chinese.4) For lexical cohesion, there are morerepetitions in Chinese sports news discourses, on the other hand, the synonymy inEnglish sports news discourses is overwhelming that in Chinese.Under the guidance of cohesion theory, based on the analysis and comparison ofdata, this thesis is designed to find out the similarities and differences between sportsnews discourses which is rarely discussed in former study. On one hand, the formerresearch on the language of sports news is quite limited; on the other hand, for contrastiveanalysis, the author has done his power from the perspective of cohesion. |
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