ABSTRACT
Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961)was a famous American novelist in 20th century, one of the world-wide renowned writers. His novels feature conciseness and accuracy outwardly, yet richness inwardly. His classic short story Hills like White Elephants, whose dialogues occupy the main body, covers the perpetual love topic through a unique viewpoint and way of expression. At present, most of the former researches on Hills like White Elephants mass in literature, rhetorical perspectives while have little to do with linguistics perspective. In literature view, scholars attach importance to protagonists, themes and ways of expression, in which Hemingway’s famous Iceberg Theory contributes to the story’s profound analysis. Some researchers discuss the rhetorical value of the story in aspects of repetition, symbolism, contrast and puns. Few linguists adopt theories of coherence, deduction and Systemic-Functional linguistics theories to interpret the dialogues.
Overall, the researches of the story are seldom concerning linguistics, compared with literature and rhetoric. After reading the story, readers may get a deep impression of irrelevant answers the two protagonists often give to each other as well as some independent scenes yet with inner relations. To understand those points thoroughly requires cohesion theory. Some writers utilize this theory, however, their papers, taking an incomplete theoretical system, don’t cover all the points. They just touch the theory without going to it deeply. Therefore, by combining the external cohesion part of Yu Xueyong’s cohesion analysis pattern, the internal cohesion part of Halliday’s and the cross-type cohesion part of Zhang Delu’s, this paper tries to carry out a further and comparatively all-round interpretation of Hills like White Elephants from cohesion perspective so as to unearth more aesthetic values of the story.
This paper mainly encompasses four parts: 1. the literature review; 2. combining the external cohesion part of Yu Xueyong’s cohesion analysis pattern, the internal cohesion part of Halliday’s and the cross-type cohesion part of Zhang Delu’s to reconstruct a new cohesive pattern; 3. employing this new pattern to analyze the story; 4. leading to the result, limitation and future direction of the studies. This paper attempts to interpret Hills like White Elephants from cohesion perspective and meanwhile obtain a new knowledge of cohesion theory.
Keywords:Hemingway’ story; cohesion; analysis
Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Literature review 2
2.1 Literary studies 2
2.1.1 Protagonists 2
2.1.2 Theme 3
2.1.3 Way of expression 3
2.2 Rhetoric studies 4
2.2.1 Repetition 4
2.2.2 Symbols 4
2.2.3 Contrasts 5
2.2.4 Puns 6
2.3 Linguistic studies 6
2.4 Comments on the previous studies 6
3. The reconstruction of the cohesive pattern 8
3.1 The definition of cohesion 8
3.2 The former studies of cohesive pattern abroad and in China 8
3.2.1 Main studies abroad 8
3.2.2 Main studies in China 9
3.3 The reconstruction of a new cohesive pattern 9
4. The analysis of Hemingway’s Hills like White Elephants from cohesion perspective 12
4.1 The external cohesion 12
4.1.1 The ideology of the writer and the context of his writing 12
4.1.2 The typical style of the writer and the features of the genre 13
4.2 The internal cohesion 13
4.2.1 Distribution of information 13
4.2.2 Non-structural cohesion 16
4.2.2.1 Grammatical cohesion 16
4.2.2.2 Lexical cohesion 20
4.2.3 Structural cohesion 25
4.2.3.1 Parallelism 25
4.2.3.2 Thematic-rhematic structure 27
4.2.4 Cross-type cohesion 28
4.2.4.1 Lexical and phrasal cohesion 28
4.2.4.2 Lexical and sentential cohesion 29
5. Conclusion 31
Acknowledgements 33
References 34