A Contrastive Study Of Cohesive Devices Applied In The Chinese And English Versions Of Wolf Totem

Cohesion is an important factor in the process of forming a text.Using the cohesive devices efficiently makes it possible to organize a text.Halliday and Hasan(1976)believe cohesion refers to relations of meaning which exist in a text,and they classified cohesive devices into grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion.The former is sub-classified into reference,substitution,ellipsis and conjunction.The later includes reiteration and collocation.In recent forty years,linguists have shifted the attentions to the study of text cohesion in succession,and thus cohesion theory has been developed into a relatively mature intellectual framework in the field of linguistics.Based on Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion theory and many representative examples from both Chinese and English text of Wolf Totem,this thesis uses the qualitative approach to contrast the application of cohesive devices between Chinese and English texts and aims to provide non-native English speakers with some inspiration in learning and teaching English grammar and translation with the assistance of the cohesion theory,and this thesis also shoulders the aim of offering translators with enlightening viewpoints on C-E/E-C translation practice and perceiving texts from the perspective of cohesion theory.On the basis of the analysis,the thesis finds that Wolf Totem and its English have certain similarities and also their own obvious preferences in the application of cohesive devices.Both grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion are frequently seen in both texts of Wolf Totem,but there are some notable differences.The phenomena are due to differences in language systems and cultural backgrounds.Some certain cohesive means,such as repetition and lexical chains,are used more frequently in the Chinese text of Wolf Totem to produce coherence;while many other cohesive methods such as reference,ellipsis are frequently used in the English texts of Wolf Totem to ensure completion of sentence structure and maintain the conciseness of the structure.