A ROUGH COMPARISON OF COHESION AND ELLIPSIS IN ENGLISH AND VIETMAMESE

Abstract

Cohesion refers to the various means and ties by which sentences and paragraphs stick together to form a text. Halliday and Hasan (1976) identify three types of cohesion in English namely grammatical, lexical and phonological ones. Ellipsis is among the three devices in the grammatical group. Owing to its distinctive features, ellipsis in English can be regarded as substitution by zero, and classified into three subgroups: nominal, verbal and phrasal. Cohesion in Vietnamese, however, is presented by Tran Ngoc Them (1999) as a system with its dual aspects of form and content, bound by a series of cohesive ties namely 'repetition, substitution, conjuntion, ellipsis....'. One of them, ellipsis, is described as playing a vital role in textual and discourse cohesion, and identified as consisting of two subgroups: 'strong ellipsis' which takes place when one of the major elements of a sentence (i.e. subject, predicate ...) is deleted; and 'weak ellpsis' when one of the minor elements (i.e. direct object, indirect object, secondary predicate...) is deleted. An initial explanation for the difference between the two different views of cohesion and ellipsis in English and Vietnamese is attributed to the typolocial differences of the two languages.