A Study of Pakistani English Newspaper Texts: An Application of Halliday and Hasan’s Model of Cohesion: A Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This article aims to examine the patterns of each type of cohesive device in light of the cohesion model proposed by Halliday and Hasan in 1976. Halliday and Hasan identified five different types of cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion in the text. This study uses the selected weekly articles authored by Cyril Almeida from well-known daily published English Newspaper “The Daily Dawn”. Analysis of text comprises Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion model, and analyzes linguistic techniques used in newspaper texts. The study finds repeated occurrences of cohesive devices such as referencing, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Moreover, reiteration is found to be the most frequently occurring cohesive device. Reference from grammatical cohesion also outnumbers all other subcategories of cohesion. In addition, many of the literary terms employed in articles make it diverse in uncovering some of the political contexts to the audience. Hence, it concludes that in the overall occurrences of lexical cohesion, reiteration and collocation are dominant; suggesting that the texts of selected news articles of Cyril Almeida are cohesive mainly because of lexical cohesion, i.e. semantic linkage through vocabulary rather than grammar.

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