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This thesis attempts to fulfill a contrastive study of English and Chinese cohesive devices in legislative texts. The corpus of the verbal data in this research is excerpted either from course books designed for in-class teaching to college students of international business major or economic law major; or from real contracts like lease contracts, copyright business contracts, joint venture contracts and so on. The paper focuses on the investigation of the distinction between the five English and Chinese cohesive devices, namely, reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion, in legal documents and provides an explanation to the differentiations between them in the end.
To do the contrastive study, 50 groups of randomly selected samples, are enclosed in this paper, each group consisting of one English text and one Chinese text. That is to say, there are altogether 100 samples investigated in this research. We adopted two methods to correspond these two language versions within one group. One is realized through translation, and the other way is by selecting different language versions with similar content. Besides, to calculate and compute the frequency of occurrence of the five cohesive devices in legislative texts, we also have to determine another element which is key to the investigation, that is a proper counting unit. This determination will directly influence the result of the calculation and computation, so it will be further discussed in the part of data analysis in the paper.
In addition to the review of previous literatures, we discussed such notions and concepts as contrastive analysis, stylistics and stylistic analysis, cohesive devices, texts and legislative language in this thesis. Apart from these, introductions to the five cohesive devices are made as a warm-up activity, offering sufficient knowledge to the later analysis. In the discussion part, examples are given to do the concrete analysis and vividly presenting on how to implement the contrast of the five cohesive devicesin legal texts of English and Chinese versions. Through statistics, tables of calculation and computation are drawn then to show where the distinctions are located and why they are.
The writing of this thesis has a practical significance, especially in terms of implications to translators and teachers. The result of this research may have significance to translation work and pedagogy in practice, and the research methods employed in this investigation can also be extended to a wider range of studies.