Cohesive Devices In English Abstracts Of Chinese And American PHD Dissertations

The cohesive device plays an extremely important role in the construction of the discourse,and there is no exception for academic writing.This thesis uses Coh-Metrix3.0,a computer text analysis tool,to compare the differences in the discourse cohesion of the English abstracts of Ph.D.thesis in both Chinese and American linguistics.The theoretical framework of this thesis is based on Halliday & Hasan’s discourse cohesion theory(1976 & 1985),as well as the classification of cohesive devices by Zhang and Liu(2003/2018).By taking account of the measurable indicators in the Coh-Metrix 3.0,the cohesive devices in this thesis are divided into two categories: explicit cohesion and implicit cohesion.And each category could be subdivided into more specific ones,lexical reiteration,reference,and connective as explicit cohesive devices,as well as latent semantic analysis(LSA)and situational cohesion as implicit cohesive devices.The final research results show that Chinese and American scholars have more significant differences in their use of explicit cohesive devices.For example,compared with Chinese scholars,American scholars use more stem and argument overlap in terms of lexical reiteration.Besides,as for the use of personal pronouns,the number of all pronouns and the first-person singular pronoun used by American scholars exceeds that of Chinese scholars.Moreover,in the use of connectives,American scholars use more adversative and contrastive connectives,while they use less temporal and additive connectives.These differences in the explicit cohesive devices between these two corpora can be attributed to the differences in language,culture,and academic habits between China and the United States.But in the comparison of explicit cohesive devices,there are not so many significant differences in their implicit cohesive devices,which proves the universality of human cognition.However,there is a significant difference between Chinese and American scholars in the ratio of given information to new information.Compared with Chinese scholars,American scholars have a higher ratio of given information to new information,leaving their texts more coherent than others.Through this research,we can draw a conclusion that Chinese scholars still have some deficiencies in their use of cohesive devices both implicitly and explicitly during their writing of English abstracts.In their future academic thesis writing,we sincerely hope that Chinese scholars can take some active measures to overcome these shortcomings.