Cross-Cultural Study of Lexical Cohesion in Political Newspaper Articles

This Study examined the use of lexical cohesion in English political news articles published in local and international English newspapers. To this end, a corpus of ۴۰.۰۰۰ words (۲۰.۰۰۰ in each corpus) were randomly collected from political news articles published online in the editorial section of international English newspapers (e.g. the Washington Post, the New York Times) and local English newspapers (e.g. Iran front Page, Tehran Times) from January to December, and were analyzed based on Tanskanen’s (۲۰۰۶) classification of lexical cohesion as reiteration and collocation. The findings showed that international English newspaper used statistically more substitution, equivalence, contrast, activity related, and elaborative collocations than local English newspapers. On the other hand, local English newspapers used significantly more simple repetition, complex repetition, generalization specification, co-specification, and order set collocation when writing political news article. Additionally, there was a significant difference between the two groups in subset of reiteration and collocation.

Keywords:

Lexical Cohesion , Newspaper Article , Political Discourse