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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Previous Studies of Text Cohesion Carried out Overseas and in China
In this chapter, the author will review some of the previous studies on cohesion carried out overseas and in China. It is Halliday and Hasan (1976) who first proposed cohesion as a linguistic term. The book Cohesion in English (Halliday and Hasan, 1976) written by them not only arouses wide attention to cohesion in the field of linguistics but also lays a theoretical foundation for the further study.
2.1.1 Studies of Text Cohesion Carried out Overseas
The earliest studies referred to or rather the first to be widely available were those of Quirk (1985), Greenhaum (1996) and Leech (2001). Among such studies, Gutwinski (1976) took the view that cohesion could be considered as the relations obtaining among the sentences and clauses of text, and he also tried to root cohesion in a stratificational framework. His focus on the potential stylistic application of cohesive studies has provided a new perspective for studies in stylistics. Fowler (1977) held that cohesion was a linguistic pattern helps to hang texts together.
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2.2 Overview of Previous Studies on English Corporate Reports
In the following the author of the thesis paper will review the literature of the previous studies on English corporate reports that justifiably cover English CSR reports. English corporate reports, as one of the most important ways to keep track of corporate activities, haven’t received much attention. Most researches on English corporate reports were done by western scholars from various perspectives, from, for example, textual analysis, corpus linguistics-based approach, thematic analysis and so forth.
2.2.1 Previous Studies on English Corporate Reports
Thomas (1993) studied “The Letter to Shareholders” by turning to Halliday’s systems of transitivity, thematic structure, context and cohesion, and condensations, and she argued tha
