Textual Cohesion And Coherence Of News Script

Cohesion and coherence are two of the most important objects of study in text analysis and this paper intends to concentrate on these two aspects and their relationship in news script.The study of cohesion is based on the statistical analysis of the frequency of various types of cohesive devices in a corpus of news script,the written form of radio and TV news report. A FoxPro program has been applied to locate those words and count their frequency. Textual coherence is approached from a cognitive and pragmatic perspective.The analysis of empirical data from the corpus shows that due to the generic characteristic of news script,lexeme is the dominating cohesive device and other grammatical cohesive devices carry little weight in news script. Qualitative method was used for the analysis of textual coherence of news script,which reveals that coherence attribution of news script is a mental process with pragmatico-cognitive inference as a major resort. This process has no notable difference from that of general English. But pragmatico-cognitive inference undertakes more responsibility for coherence attribution compared with other types of text. This finding can shed some light on how news script is organized and offers a news perspective on the way we store and process language that is of some relevance to language teachers.