Lexical cohesion in english brief news on oil price = liên kết từ vựng trong các tin vắn tiéng anh về giá dầu

Reiteration Chapter 2: Lexical Cohesion in English Brief News on Oil Price 2.1.. Lexical Cohesion in English Brief News on Oil Price 2.3.1... Part B: DevelopmentsChapter 1: Theoretical B

( “liªn kÕt tõ vùng trong c¸c tin v¾n

tiÕng anh vÒ gi¸ dÇu”)

summary of Graduation thesis

Field: Discourse analysis

Supervisor : Phan Thi Van Huong, M.A.

Student : Tran Thi Tuyet

Firstly, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor,

MA Phan Thi Van Huong for her readiness at all time to give me usefuladvice, critical feedback and useful materials, without which the thesiswould not be completed

Secondly, I should like to thank all my lecturers from Department ofForeign Languages, Vinh University for their valuable lectures on the areawhich help me orient the topic.

Finally, I wish to thank my family and my friends for their support andencouragement they gave me when I was doing this thesis

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TABLE OF CONTENTS (chua co so trang)

Acknowledgement

Tables of contents

Part A: Introduction

1 Reasons for Choosing the Topic

2 Aims of the Study

3 Scope of the Study

4 Methods of the Study

5 Design of the Study

Part B: Developments

Chapter 1: Theoretical Background

1.1 Discourse

1.2 Discourse and Text

1.3 Spoken and Written Discourse

1.4 Discourse Context

1.4.1 Context of Situation

1.4.2 Context versus Co- text

1.5 The Concept of Cohesion

1.6 Cohesion and Coherence

1.7 Types of Cohesive Devices

1.8 Lexical Cohesion

1.8.1 Concept of Lexical Cohesion

1.8.2 Types of Lexical Cohesion

1.8.2.1 Collocation

1.8.2.2 Reiteration

Chapter 2: Lexical Cohesion in English Brief News on Oil Price

2.1 A Brief Introduction to Data under Analysis

2.2 General Structure of Brief News in English Press

2.3 Lexical Cohesion in English Brief News on Oil Price

2.3.1 Collocation

2.3.2 Reiteration

2.3.2.1 Repetition

2.3.2.2 Synonyms/Near - synonyms

2.3.2.3 Superordinates and General Words

Chapter 3: Discuss and Implication

Part B: Developments

Chapter 1: Theoretical Background

Chapter 2: Lexical Cohesion in English Brief News on Oil Price

2.1 A Brief Introduction to Data under Analysis 14 2.2 General Structure of Brief News in English Press 14 2.3 Lexical Cohesion in English Brief News on Oil Price 15

Chapter 3: Discuss and Implications

Part A: Introduction

1 Reasons for Choosing the Topic

When reading a text, the first impression that helps readers understandits content is the feeling that it hangs together This way is implemented byvarious linguistic devices including grammatical and lexical ones According

to David Nunan (1995:31), lexical cohesion is the single most importantform of cohesion, accounting for something like 40% of cohesion ties in text.Therefore, lexical cohesion can also make significant contribution to creatingcoherence of discourse The first reason originates from the author’s beliefthat obtaining a sufficient awareness of the vivid existence of lexicalcohesion as a cohesive device, of its significant role in generating textualcoherence as well as of proper ways in which it is used by native speakers(writers) can be helpful to her learning and writing English

Authentic materials are no doubt a good source for language learning.English brief news are said not only to contain updated information but also

to be a useful and typical demonstration of lexical as well as grammaticalcohesion usage

Moreover, being interested in lexical cohesion, we find it veryinteresting and appropriate to apply related theories into news-in-brief dailyupdated on oil price-one of the hottest topics in the world now

From the above-mentioned reasons, we decided to choose “LexicalCohesion in Brief News on Oil Price” to be the theme of the thesis

2 Aims of the Study

The aims of the thesis are:

- To emphasize the important role of lexical cohesion in creating textualcoherence

- To give some statistics and descriptions of lexical cohesion used in theselected English brief news

- To make a first attempt to study the reasons leading to differentdegrees of fondness in using each type of lexical cohesion in English briefnews

- To suggest some practical applications in teaching and learningEnglish lexical cohesion using English brief news as authentic material

3 Scope of the Study

Our study deals with types of lexical cohesion in discourse provided byHalliday & Hasan (1976) including collocation and reiteration Types ofgrammatical cohesion are out of the thesis

The data analyzed in the thesis are brief news inhttp://news.yahoo.com/topics/oil-and-gas and http://www.oilmarketer.co.uk/.t The brief news are about world current oil price The oil price in the world hasviotiled so much and has become a hot topic in the press

Examples employed in chapter 2 are taken from the brief news

4 Methods of the Study

- Collecting brief news related to the topic: world oil price.

- Finding out the examples containing different types of lexicalcohesion

- Analyzing some typical examples of each type

- Reaching some conclusions on the subject-matter under investigationand accordingly giving necessary comments

5 Design of the Study

There are 3 main parts in this research paper:

Part A: Introduction

This part introduces the reasons, aims, scope, methods and design of thestudy

Part B: Development

This part consists of three chapters:

Chapter 1: Theoretical background

Chapter 2: Lexical cohesion in brief news on oil price

Chapter 3: Discussion and Implication

Part C: Conclusion

This part reviews what has been discussed in the content of the thesisand points out some suggestions for further study

Part B: Development Chapter 1: Theoretical Background

1.1 Discourse

Since the time Discourse Analysis came into being as a branch of

linguistics, the term “discourse” has been defined in different ways A discourse, according to Crystal (1992:25) is “a continuous stretch of

(especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit such as a sermon, argument, joke or narrative” Barbara

Johnstone (2002:2) claims that “discourse usually means actual instances of

communication in the medium of language” According to Nunan (1993), a

discourse is “a stretch of language consisting of several sentences perceived

as being related in some ways, in terms of the ideas they share and in terms

of the jobs they perform within discourse.”

In this thesis, the notion that seems to be the most acceptable is the one

proposed by Guy Cook (1995:198) seeing discourse as “stretches of

language perceived to be meaningful, unified and purposive”.

1.2 Discourse and Text

There is still disagreement about the meaning of these two terms

“discourse” and “text” For some linguists, the terms seem to be used almost

interchangeably as Nunan (1995:1) indicates “A text, or a discourse, is a

stretch of language that may be larger than a sentence.”

However, some other writers draw a clear distinction between them.Widdowson (1984) is probably one of the first who make a very explicitdistinction According to him, text typically has cohesion whereasdiscourse has coherence, which can be illustrated by the followingexample:

A: Did you buy meat for lunch, Lan?

B: I have not gone to market yet.

Although there is no formal link between A and B, the listener can inferthat Lan did not buy meat because she had not gone to market.

As in Widdowson (1984:100) the difference and the interrelationshipsbetween the two can be summarized:

Discourse is a communicative process by means of interaction Its situational outcome is a change in a state of affairs: information is conveyed, intensions made clear, its linguistic product is text.

Other acclamations of some linguists are also similar to Widdowson’sviewpoint, i.e., discourse is language in action (or interaction) while a text isthe written record of that interaction It is obvious that this view seesdiscourse as bringing together language, the individuals producing thelanguage and the context within which the language is used On the otherhand, other linguists tend to avoid using the term “discourse” altogether, andaccept the term “text” for all recorded instances of language in use

This study supports the distinction indicated by Salkie (1993): “the term

text is used to refer to any written record of a communicative event whereas

the term discourse refers to the interpretation of the communicative event in

context” The event itself can be oral language (a sermon, a casualconversation, a shopping transaction) or written language (a poem, anewspaper advertisement, a wall poster, etc.)

1.3 Spoken and Written Discourse

Spoken and written discourse simply mean speech and writing It hasbeen widely agreed by linguists that there are common features as well asdifferent ones between these two forms of language

According to Halliday (1985), writing emerged in society as a result ofcultural changes which created new communicative needs that could not bereadily met by the spoken language

Approvingly, Raphael Salkie (1993) contributes that the contexts forusing written language are very different from those in which spoken

language is used For example, in the case of information, writtenlanguage is used to communicate with others who are removed in timeand space, or for those occasions of which a permanent or semi-permanent is required.

Accordingly, one can not deny that spoken discourse is oftenconsidered to be less planned and orderly, more open to intervention bythe receivers while written discourse is much better structured and thepossibilities for subordinate participants are limited Brown and Yule(1983) claim that spoken and written discourse serve various functions,the former is used for the establishment and maintenance of humanrelationships (interactional use) and the latter for the working out of andtransference of information (transactional use) (cited in Dang HuuPhuoc-graduation thesis)

On the other hand, some linguists see common points between thesetwo forms of language David Nunan (1995) believes that they both perform

an equivalent range of board functions, i.e they both are employed to getthings done, to provide information and to entertain

Michael McCarthy (1991:150) additionally proposes, ‘both spoken andwritten discourses are dependent on their immediate contexts to a greater orlesser degree’, and ‘implicitness and explicitness [of the language beingused] will depend on what is being communicated to whom, rather thanmerely on whether the discourse is spoken or written’

In short, despite the fact that written and spoken discourses are twodifferent forms of language, they both carry out many functions ofcommunication and the differences are not absolute, and the characteristicsthat we tend to associate with written language can sometimes occur inspoken language and vice versa

1.4 Discourse Context

1.4.1 Context of Situation

David Nunan (1995:7) suggests a concept and a classification of context

of situation (or context in short) as follows:

Context refers to the situation giving rise to the discourse, and withinwhich the discourse is imbedded There are two different types of context.The first of these is the linguistic context - the language that surrounds oraccompanies the piece of discourse under analysis The second is non-linguistic or experiential context within which the discourse takes place.Non-linguistic contexts include: the type of communicative event (forexample: joke, story, lecture, greeting, conversation); the topic, the purpose

of the event, the setting including location, time of day, season of year andphysical aspects of the situation (for example: size of zoom, arrangement offurniture); the participants and the relationships between them; and thebackground knowledge and assumptions underlying the communicativeevent

This viewpoint of Nunan is much similar to that of Halliday and Hasan(1976) who claim that when responding to a spoken or a written passage(discourse or text), the receiver employs not only linguistic clues, but alsosituational ones Linguistically, he responds to specific features which bindthe passage together, the pattern of connection, independence of structurethat we are referring to as cohesion; situationally, he takes into account all heknows of the environment: what is going on, what part of language isplaying, and who are involved

The importance of context toward discourse interpretation is apparentlyundeniable, as Cook (1989:10) asserts: ‘There are good arguments forlimiting the field of the study to make it manageable, but it is also true to saythat the answer to the question of what gives discourse its unity may be

impossible to give without considering the world at large: the context.’

For all the facts above, both linguistic and non-linguistic contexts aretaken into account in this study It is because Lexical Cohesion, as a cohesivedevice and as an actual use of lexis, is obviously concerned with linguistic

factors but how that use is carried out also greatly depends on non-linguisticfeatures of discourse.

1.4.2 Context versus Co-text

It is necessary to tell these two terms from each other David Nunan

(1995) holds that co-text is considered the linguistic element and context the

non-linguistic one More specifically, Brown and Yule (1983) claim that

‘any sentence other than the first in a fragment of discourse will have the whole of its interpretation forcibly constrained by the preceding text’ and

‘the words occurring in discourse are constrained by their co-text’ (cited in

Dang Huu Phuoc - graduation thesis)

In his Pragmatics (1996), Yule considers co-text as linguistic material,

accompanying the referring expression The role of co-text is illustrated withthe example as follows:

The Hamburger went out without paying.

In this sentence, if we stop reading at "the Hamburger", we may thinkthat it is a cake However, when we read the rest of the sentence (co-text)

"went out without paying" we know that it can not be a cake but a person

buying hamburger

In short, both context and co-text are important in discourseinterpretation but they clearly differ from one another Context is concernedwith non-linguistic (external) elements whereas co-text with linguistic(internal) ones

1.5 The Concept of Cohesion

Cohesion is easy to recognize but the way of seeing it is not absolutelysimilar among researchers However, they all agree that cohesion is verynecessary in teaching and learning language.

Halliday and Hasan (1976:4) in their long study of cohesion in Englishdefine cohesion as “a semantic one: it refers to the relations of meaning thatexist within the text and that define it as a text.” Obviously, according tothem the primary determinant of whether a set of sentences do or do notconstitute a text depends on cohesive relationship between the sentenceswhich create texture The texture is provided by cohesive relationships.Halliday and Hasan (1976:4) also suggest:

Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some elements in the discourse is dependent on that of another The one presupposes the other, in the sense that it can not be effectively decoded except by resource to it When this happens a relation of cohesion is set up, and the two elements, the presupposing and the presupposed, are thereby at least potentially integrated into a text

This explanation can be best accounted for by the following example:

Read the book on the table It is very interesting.

We see that ‘it’ in the second sentence refers back to ‘the book’ in the first sentence This anaphoric function of ‘it’ gives cohesion to the two

sentences which constitutes a text

Cohesion is much involved, but not coincided, with another notionknown as coherence

1.6 Cohesion and Coherence

Nunan (1993:116) clearly indicates the difference between cohesion andcoherence: “coherence is the extent to which discourse is perceived to hang togetherrather than a set of unrelated sentences or utterances and cohesion is formal linksshowing the relationships among clause and among sentences in discourse.”

Coherence, obviously, is concerned with the feeling that the text hangstogether or the type of rhetorical relationship that underlines text Coherence

is something invisible and attributed to the creation of the readers’ mind,

very often with the assistance of cohesion whereas cohesion occurs visibly indiscourse but only serves as signals, guides or clues to coherence Coherenceoften depends on the common shared background knowledge, implication orinference The following short dialogue may provide an illustration:

A: Would you like to go to the cinema tonight?

B: I’m going to have a test tomorrow.

The response seems unrelated to the former sentence but it becomescoherent if A knows the implication that B can not go to the cinema because

he is busy to prepare for his tomorrow’s test

Cohesion itself does not guarantee coherence and coherence sometimescan be realized without any resource to cohesion Let us have a look at twofollowing examples:

(1): Clare loves potatoes She was born in Ireland.

(2): A: Did you buy meat for lunch, Lan?

B: I have not gone to market yet.

In the first example, despite of the existence of anaphoric function

(“She” refers to Clare) as a cohesive device, one could hardly say that the

two clauses are coherent if he does not know the stereotype ethnicassociation between being Irish and loving potatoes Conversely, withouthaving a formal link, the conversation in the second example can still beperceived to hang and make sense together in reader’s or hearer’s mind withthe assistance of his schemata that Lan did not buy meat because she had notgone to market

In short, cohesion is only a guide to coherence and coherence issomething created by the act of reading the text Coherence is the feeling that

a text hangs together, that it makes sense, and is not just a jumble ofsentences Coherence is embodied by a system of cohesive devices andcohesion is mainly used to embody coherence Cohesion plays a greatlyimportant part in creating coherence but does not guarantee coherence

We can summarize the distinction between cohesion and coherence through the following table.

- is in the text

- grammatical/ lexical relationship

- clues, signal/guide to coherence

- is in the readers’/listeners’ mind

- the feeling that the text makes sense

- the reader has to create coherence

1.7 Types of Cohesive Devices

In this thesis, we adopt the division of cohesive devices by Halliday andHasan (1976) which can be illustrated by the graph as follows:

1.8.1 Concept of Lexical Cohesion

Linguists have introduced similar definitions of lexical cohesion Forinstance, Halliday and Hasan (1976:318) hold that lexical cohesion isestablished through the structure if the lexis, or vocabulary Raphael Salkie

(1993 : 28) similarly states “lexical cohesion occurs when two words in a

text are semantically related in some way-in other words, they are related in terms of meaning.”

Hence, lexical cohesion can mostly generally be seen as the textual

cohesion existing between linguistic elements in discourse thanks to the exploitation of semantic relations of lexis.

1.8.2 Types of Lexical Cohesion

As seen from the graph in 1.7, lexical cohesion holds two main types:Collocation and Reiteration

1.8.2.1 Collocation

Collocation is concerned with the tendency of linguistic items to occur in the same lexical environment without depending on any semanticrelationships

co-Collocation may generate a cohesive force by pairs of words like

laugh… joke, blade… sharp, garden……dig, ill….doctor, try… succeed,

sunshine… cloud, or by long cohesive chains like candle… flame… flicker, hair….comb… curl….wave, poetry….literature… reader… writer…… style, sky….sunshine… cloud… rain waving in and out of successive

sentences

Following is a short paragraph with a chain of collocational cohesion:

recession….Economic….economists….business cycles… markets….oil… stocks….barrel.

“The U.S entered a recession in December 2007, the National Bureau

of Economic Research, a private, non-profit panel of economists that dates American business cycles, said Dec 1 U.S equity markets declined yesterday as oil stocks dropped on forecasts of $25-a-barrel crude from analysts at Merrill Lynch”.

1.8.2.2 Reiteration

Reiteration, contrary to collocation, is characterized by the conditionthat there must be some explicit semantic relation between cohesivelinguistic items Halliday and Hasan (1976:319) introduce a definition of

reiteration which states “Reiteration is the repetition of a lexical item, or the

occurrence of a synonym of some kind, in the context of reference, that is, where the two occurrences have the same reference.” Later on, Mc Carthy

(1991:65) likewise holds that “Reiteration means either restating an item in

a later part of the discourse by direct repetition or else reasserting its meaning by exploiting lexical relations.”

In brief, reiteration is a type of formal cohesive device in which the twocohesive items refer to the same entity or event, and is considered a majorcharacteristic that makes discourse coherent

So far, linguists have widely adopted the classification of Reiteration byHalliday and Hasan (1976) according to which Reiteration embraces fourmain types: Repetition, Synonyms/Near-synonyms, Superordinates, andGeneral words

They illustrated these 4 types with the examples below:

There’s a boy climbing that tree.

a The boy’s going to fall if he doesn’t take care.

b The lad’s going to fall if he doesn’t take care.

c The child’s going to fall if he doesn’t take care.

d The idiot’s going to fall if he doesn’t take care.

In (a), boy is directly restated in the second sentence and this is called repetition; the reiteration in (b) takes the form of a synonym lad; of a superordinate child in (c) and in (d), of a general word idiot.

Mc Cathy (1991:66) uses slightly different terms for the third and the

fourth types He calls them “immediate superordinate” and “general

superordinate” which are sub-kinds of superordinate simply In spite of the

difference of the terms, the criteria to distinguish them are the same

In summary, this chapter has dealt with the theory related to lexicalcohesion mainly proposed by Halliday and Hasan In brief, lexical cohesionincludes two main types: collocation and reiteration, of which reiteration has

four sub-type: repetition, synonyms/near-synonyms, superordinates, andgeneral words All of them will be discussed in the progress of the study.

Chapter 2: Lexical Cohesion in English Brief

News on Oil Price2.1 A Brief Introduction to Data under Analysis

As once mentioned in the scope of the study, all pieces of news to beanalyzed and synthesized in this thesis are brief news retrieved fromhttp://news.yahoo.com/topics/oil-and-gas and http://www.oilmarketer.co.uk/.All of these brief news describe the world current oil price with no individual

opinion or expression A brief news, as the adjective “brief” implies, is rather

short (and in many cases, an individual sentence is also a paragraph on its own)

Some general statistics of the selected materials are given in the table below:

Total of pieces

Total In average Total In average

10 3099 309.9 84 8.4

Table 1 - General statistics of material under investigation

2.2 General Structure of Brief News in English Press

According to Tiersky and Chernoff (1993:45) news stories, of whichbrief news is one sub-type, is a concept widely used by most pressmen andpress researchers to refer to a type of news in which the reporters usuallyinform the readers only about the facts without overtly expressing their ownopinions

There are 3 parts in a news story: the headline, the lead and the body.The headline, gives the main idea is given, the lead or opening paragraphwhich repeats the main idea in more detail, and the body or the rest of thestory adds full details and quotes from the people involved This organization is often applied in brief news

discourse Let us have a look at this example as an illustration:

HEADLINE

LEAD

BODY

Prices continue to fall for gasoline, crude oil

COLUMBUS, Ohio Retail gasoline fell to a new three-year low Tuesday and in an unprecedented decline, crude oil costs $100 less per barrel than it did four months ago with a U.S recession eating away at energy demand Analysts believe prices at the pump may finally be bottoming out after a precipitous decline from record highs this summer Yet demand could fall even further in January with job losses reducing the number of people who drive to work.

Crude has fallen nearly 70 percent since July 11, when it hit $147.27 Gas prices fell for the 20th week since the July 4th holiday and hit

$1.811 per gallon, according to the government's Energy Information Agency.

Auto club AAA, the Oil Price Information Service and Wright Express said prices fell 0.8 cents overnight to $1.812, down 62.4 cents in the past month and $1.249 in the past year.

2.3 Lexical Cohesion in English Brief News on Oil Price

2.3.1 Collocation

It can be seen that collocation is a phenomenon commonly used in eachbrief news It seems that every paragraph contains this phenomenon As theinformation of the brief news is about oil, collocational pairs or chains areabout these following lexical relations: kinds of oil, currencies, oilmeasurement units, oil price trend, of which collocational chains on oilmeasurement units are most frequently observed For example, these arecollocational pairs or chains in each paragraph found in piece 1, 5,and 6:Piece 1:

- Crude oil…OPEC….output….light sweet crude…down…oil…trading

- OPEC ministers…meeting.

- Production…decline…prices…oil…down…record

- Crude oil…barrels…gasoline…barrels

- The dollar … the euro … British pound

- Economic front…manufacturing factor…the decrease…index

- The economies…recession…central bank….reductions

- Brent crude oil…fell…percent…barrel…barrel

- Oil minister…OPEC…cut …output…

environment of currency for the chain “ the dollar…the euro…British

pound ” in piece 1, of oil price trend for “ prices…dropped…down…”, of oil

measurement units for “ barrels…gallon…cubic feet…”, etc.

Generally, it can be said that collocation is a very effective cohesivedevice in these news-in-brief texts It generates a certain cohesive force evenwith only a pair of words in a collocational environment However, as can beseen in the news-in-brief texts, chains of words are preferred than pairs ofwords

2.3.2 Reiteration

2.3.2.1 Repetition

Repetition is a type of reiteration in which the writer repeats exactly alexical item previously appearing in the text

Among four main types of reiteration, the survey witnesses repetition to

be the most frequently employed (376 of 509 in whole, holding 73,87 %) It

is rather understandable for the fact that it is the most natural and easiest way

to reiterate a lexical item

The chief purpose of brief news is to shortly inform the daily facts, not

to express reporters’ opinions or comments Therefore, the supremerequirement to this kind of article is exactness and truthfulness It mayexplain why exact reiteration (repetition), especially of nouns, is

overwhelmingly preferred The nouns repeated are usually concerned withkinds of oil, oil measurement units, and other surrounding oil price Forexample:

Crude prices lower on EIA forecast

Crude oil prices fell Wednesday after the US Energy Information Administration cut its demand growth predictions and said that demand will average 85.93 million barrels per day in the United States next year.

The EIA said that oil demand in the US will drop by 5.4 percent this year and by another 1.3 percent in 2009, while the International Energy Agency said it could cut its demand growth forecast again.

West Texas Intermediate crude for December delivery was $3.14 lower to $56.19 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange while at last report December contracts for Brent crude had dropped $3.06 to $52.65 per barrel on the ICE Futures Europe exchange in London.

In afternoon trade Nynex December gasoline futures dropped 5 cents to $1.26 per gallon while December heating oil was down 7 cents to $1.86 per gallon.

The price declines came ahead of the new EIA inventories report, due Thursday, which is expected to show that US crude oil, gasoline and distillate stockpiles all grew last week.

In addition, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said it could cut production again as soon as the end of this month if prices continue to drop.

In this text, there are also repetitions of verbs: drop, cut (we can find

these words are repeated so many times in all of the pieces analyzed) It is

easily understood because the trend of current oil price is down And because

of this fact, many verbs of this semantic field are used to replace it like slip,

dip, fall, decline, etc.

Among content words, adjectives and adverbs are repeated in a very

limited rate Adjectives are usually parts of noun phrases: US crude oil

inventories, natural gas, central bank, cubic feet, etc The following extract

is an example:

“ Heating oil came off because of natural gas and natural gas came off because the inventory injection number was interpreted as a little on the bearish side”.

The adjectives are usually repeated in repeated noun phrases whichmainly communicate important information Reiterating these adjectives inother kinds rather than repetition is not only a hard task to reporters but also

a possible risk That is, readers may be confused that a noun phrase refersnot back to a previous occurrence in the text but to a new entity That may,therefore, put them in difficult in realizing the coherence of the text

There is one case the adjective is repeated but not in the same noun phrase as follows:

Oil plummets on dire US jobs figures

VIENNA, Austria – Oil prices plummeted Friday as the already battered market reacted to unexpectedly high US unemployment figures -the latest dramatic evidence of recession in the world's largest market for crude

With cold weather settling in parts of the U.S and the rest of the Northern hemisphere, this time of year is normally bullish for the market But the weak US jobs report added to the gloom spread by other dire economic data to counteract the usual trend for increased winter demand.

The adjective “ dire” is repeated but in another noun phrase However,

it is an adjective which communicates important information on the samefactual situation of “ US job figures” and “ economic data” Thus, thereplacement of this adjective by another is unnecessary or even un suitable.Similarly, the repetition of adverbs can seldom be found in the briefnews analyzed The majority of adverbial elements in sentences are adverbphrases Most of these adverbials involve actual facts of the event being

mentioned as: at-the-pump prices, since February 2004, on July 11, in

December 2007, on the economic front, etc As readers usually pay their

attention to the main contents of the news rather than where and when theevents happened, adverbial elements are not very frequently repeated Thesemay explain the fact that in all the texts synthesized, only a few exactrepetition occurrences adverb phrases are observed Here is one of them:

Oil Falls to Lowest in Almost 4 Years as U.S Job Losses Worsen

Crude oil fell to the lowest in almost four years after a report showed the U.S economy lost the most jobs in November in 34 years, signaling the recession is getting worse

In general, almost all of adjectives and adverbs in the brief news haveneutral nuances of meaning and they are used to modify factual informationrather than to express reporters’ attitudes and opinions

Finally, this is a table of the most frequently repeated lexical items observed in the data analyzed:

Table 2 - Most frequently repeated lexical items observed in data analyzed

2.3.2.2 Synonyms and Near-synonyms

Synonym is the cohesive device in which two or more words have thesame meaning In terms of frequency, synonym ranks second after repetitionwith 66/509 occurrences, accounting for 12,97 %

This thesis adopts Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) classification of reiterationwhich includes Synonyms and Near-synonyms A pair of synonyms differs fromthat of near-synonyms in terms of lexis category Of such a pair, if the reiterated

and reiterating are of the same category (such as had fallen and had dropped in

the following example), they are called synonyms:

The latest reports had Nynex December gasoline down 6 cents to $1.30 per gallon while December heating oil had fallen 8 cents to $1.93 per gallon and January natural gas had dropped 47 cents to $6.95 per million British thermal units.

On the other hand, if they are of different categories, they are called

near-synonyms like fell and decrease in the following example: