A Study Of Discourse Cohesion And Coherence In Pulitzer Prize-winning Editorials

The Pulitzer Prize has gone through 100 years since its inception in 1917.After a hundred years of development,it has become “the Nobel Prize in the press”.The Pulitzer Prize for journalism includes 14 categories,among which the Pulitzer Prize Editorials Writings,regarded as the excellent argumentative writing with its “clear style,moral purpose,sound reasoning and powerful influence in the right direction”,has attracted extensive concern.In order to explore the style of such authentic English argumentative writing,this paper collects 36 Pulitzer Prize-winning Editorials articles from 1997 to 2016 and analyzes them from the perspective of discourse cohesion and coherence with the help of UAM Corpus Tool 2.8.17.The coherence of discourse theme is embodied in its semantic macro-structure.It is found by the present study that the semantic macro-structure of this kind of works contains four coherent topics,including main event,consequence,people's reactions and the author's evaluation.From the perspective of cohesion,the most frequently used cohesive device is the grammatical,accounting for almost half of the use of all cohesive devices.The second one is “reference”.Other cohesive devices such as grammatical “substitution” “ellipsis” and lexical “reiteration” and “collocation” also occupy a certain proportion.The use of cohesive devices for each topic in the semantic macro-structure of coherence is further discussed.The research findings show that in the description of the first topic,“main event”,the most frequently used device is “reference”.In the topic of “consequences”,“reference” and “repetition” are mostly employed.In“reactions”,the use of “reference” “substitution” “conjunction” and “collocation” also constitutes some proportion.For the last topic,the use of “collocation” and“conjunction” takes the main part.It can be seen that in the presentation of news event and its consequence and others' reactions,the Pulitzer Prize-winning Editorials writers try to describe the fact objectively and emphasize its impact truthfully.Meanwhile,in the expression of the attitudes of others and themselves,they pay more attention to the vigor of logic,clarity of thought and rationality of argument.In short,it is just through the coherence of a series of related topics triggered by news events and the corresponding cohesivedevices that the winners have displayed their clear style and powerful reasoning of editorial writing which at last affect public opinions.This study provides a new perspective for readers to further understand and analyze news works.It can help us master the writing skills of excellent English editorials,get to know the social problems they reflect and deeply understand the western culture.At the same time,the study can also provides some useful enlightenment for the reading and writing of English argumentative writings.