Cross-Cultural Study of Lexical Cohesion in Political Newspaper Articles

Abstract

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 40,000 words (20,000 in each corpus) were randomly collected from political news articles published in 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 classification of lexical cohesion. The findings showed that international English newspapers 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.