A comparative study of cohesion in academic and newspaper texts

Abstract

The present study is a work on cohesion and how in contributes to coherence of texts. Cohesion of text samples on road traffic accidents from the academic text category is compared to that of samples on the same these from the reportage text category.

The study follows the descriptive framework by Halliday and Hasan (1976) to identify and describe the cohesive devices present in the samples. Later, these cohesive devices are reclassified according to Hartnet (1986) into those that achieve staticness and those that achieve dynamism in a bid to find out which of the two text categories is more coherent than the other.

Perhaps a major contribution of this study is the revelation that using cohesion as the yardstick, academic texts used in this study are found to be more coherent than texts from the reportage text category. The study however recommends that research should be carried out using more data than that used here to prove whether Hartnet's (1986) model will determine their coherence.