Bradley's English School
Koriyama, Fukushima, Japan

This is another paper I wrote for my masters degree. As with the others, I am very interested in doing more reasearch in this area. The main focus of this analysis is on the features of cohesion present in the news reports based upon Halliday's model of cohesion. Two news reports were taken from a broad-sheet newspaper and the same two from a tabloid. These were checked for the features Michael Halliday suggests and comparisons made between the two newspapers. The features of cohesion examined are endopheric reference (demonstrative, comparative, pronominal and possessive), ellipsis and substitution, conjunction, and lexical cohesion (repetition, synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms and meronyms). The analysis showed that there was very little difference in the cohesive features of broad-sheet and tabloid news reports. Obviously, two news reports is a very small amount of data and so further analysis is necessary, both using more articles and other linguistic analyses before we can say they are the same. As this analysis of the differences in cohesion between broad-sheets and tabloids did not indicate any major differences, one is left wondering why so many articles for teachers mention links to broad-sheet newspapers only. If the student is working on opposites, synonyms, etc. the above analysis shows that the teacher can use either source for a text. A file (Adobe pdf format) containing the full paper (minus the texts for copyright reasons) can be viewed by clicking here. Perhaps you have done other analyses on newspapers. If you found anything interesting please contact me by clicking here and sending a message.