A Contrastive Analysis of Explicit Cohesion in English Advertising Texts and Their Chinese Consecutive Interpretation Versions

Abstract

Although much research has been conducted on language features of advertising, little has been reported on the contrast between language use in advertisements, particularly advertisements in English and those in Chinese. Drawing on Halliday and Hasan’s theory about cohesion in text, this paper reports on the explicit cohesion devices used in advertising texts in English and Chinese. The data were derived from Singapore, a multilingual country where English and Chinese are two important languages. A total of thirty advertisements in English and their Chinese versions were analyzed for the distribution of explicit cohesive devices, i.e., lexical cohesion and grammatical cohesion. The study reveals that advertisements in English used more reference and conjunction devices than those in Chinese, whereas Chinese language advertisements employed more ellipsis devices than English language advertisements. It also finds that there were no differences in the use of substitution and lexical devices in English or Chinese language advertisements. The conclusion of the study is finally drawn and the further study is suggested.