HOW A TEXT BINDS TOGETHER: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE

Abstract

The basic purpose of this study is to investigate how English language
cohesive devices are exploited in a news text. The analysis has been carried out on news
article “The Pleasure of Reading” by Zubeda Mustafa published in one of the famous
newspaper- Dawn news.Halliday and Hasan’s(1976) framework was applied for the
cohesion analysis. Halliday and Hasan (1976) provided the concepts of referencing,
ellipsis, conjunction, substitution and lexical cohesion which have been analyzed in the
present study. The study establishes the fact that all the above mentioned cohesive
elements are exploited in the text which have ultimately contributed to clarify the
overall meanings of the text by binding it in a more organized way. It has been observed
thatnews writers do introduce cohesion in order to give a sense of connection and order
in the text. In fact, these cohesive devices provide a sense of connectivity and unity in
the text.