Patterns of Lexical Cohesion in Arabic Newspaper Editorials

The present study offers an integrated model of lexical cohesion in arabic newspapers’ editorials that falls into three main categories: reiteration relations, comprising repetition, paraphrase and summary; systematic semantic relations including synonymy, contrast, specification, generalization and co-specification; and collocation relations. it captures two novel categories that contribute significantly to newspaper editorials: paraphrase and summary, both of which offer readers an understanding of vague or culture-bound terms and summarize the writers’ opinions. the adequacy of this model is tested against a corpus of 105 newspaper editorials (42,878 words) from three main newspapers in jordan: al rai, al dustoor and al ghad. a statistical analysis of the corpus reports that reiteration relations are the most frequent type in newspaper discourse (53.7%), followed by systematic semantic relations (24.5%) and collocations (21.7%). the study argues that many of the systematic semantic relations are triggered by the headline, which is reported to play a significant role in the cohesiveness of newspaper discourse, generating a set of items that belongs to the same semantic field and presaging the use of some expressions. following hoey (1991), stokes et al. (2004), and yankova (2006), the model emphasizes the importance of lexical cohesion in creating textual continuity.