| This thesis aims to examine lexical cohesion in two genres of news,including political news from broadsheet newspapers and entertainment news from tabloid newspapers.As an important part of systemic functional linguistics,cohesion is the grammatical and lexical linking within a text or sentence that holds a text together and gives it meaning.It is related to the broader concept of coherence.There are two main types of cohesion: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion.The aim of this thesis is to explore and explain the occurrences of four types of lexically cohesive devices,i.e.repetition,synonymy,antonymy and collocational cohesion,all of which are generally evident in both political and entertainment news articles.The data for the analysis comprises thirty randomly selected news articles for each news genre and the model for analysis is mainly taken from Halliday and Hasan's theory of cohesion.The manner and frequency of the occurrences of the four types of cohesive devices in each news genre are investigated and calculated.The results show that firstly,repetition is the most prominent cohesive device which manifests itself among a large number of cohesive chains in both political newspaper articles and entertainment newspaper articles,and that political newspaper articles use simple and complex repetition more frequently than entertainment newspaper articles.Repetitions are used in news massively mainly to repeat thematic words or key words to get them across to readers.Political news,massive in the amount of information and complicated in content,thus employs simple repetitions more frequently;in order to present a rich pool of diverse lexical items to cater to its highbrow target readers,it also makes the most of complex repetitions.Secondly,both news genres use synonyms and antonyms to create cohesion,with political newspaper articles exploiting synonyms in a more frequent manner and both genres using antonyms the least frequently.The use of synonymy can not only allow the news writer to familiarize their readers with some concept by explaining it multiple times and in different terms,but also ensures the richness of vocabulary.Granted that political news is characterized by more intricate information and more cultivated readers,synonyms are more often used by it.Antonyms,though able to emphasize concepts by making semantic contrasts,often go in pair,meaning that it is hard to form an uninterrupted cohesive chain of antonymy in a text and hence the least used device.Lastly,collocational bonds are also an important cohesive instrument,though entertainment newspaper articles tend to use them more frequently than political newspaper articles.This is because entertainment news,what with its sensational stories and eye-catching topics,is prone to satisfying the expectation of its target readers with an appetite for all kinds of gossips and stories by way of collocational cohesion.Then the implications of these results are discussed and it follows that the use of lexically cohesive devices between the two news genres may be affected by their different groups of readers and different communicating purposes,thereby revealing that genres have a bearing on the use of lexical cohesion.Besides,the thesis selects several samples from the corpus to spell out how the four types of lexically cohesive devices come into effect in news texts.The thesis makes some comments on how discourse of different genres and the discursive forces therein could render the textual realization of cohesion what it is.The findings show that the genres of texts can determine the patterning of lexical cohesion to a great degree. |
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