An Analysis of Lexical Cohesion in Op-Ed Articles of The Jakarta Post Newspaper

ABSTRACT The researcher conducted the study entitled “An analysis of lexical cohesion in Op-Ed articles of The Jakarta Post newspaper. The objectives of this study were to find out lexical cohesion type which appear in the articles and to discover the dominant kind of it. This study applied mixed method research design. The objects of the study were 3 different interesting topic taken from Op-Ed articles of The Jakarta Post newspaper. The data were collected through documentation. Furthermore, the data were analyzed using Halliday and Hassan’s theory of cohesion in English (1976). The technique of analysis involved categorization, abstraction and coding the text. To see the dominant kind of lexical cohesion, the researcher used percentage and count it manually. Then, the results showed that all types of lexical cohesion are appeared in the text. The types were repetition, synonym or near-synonym, superordinate, general words and collocation. The highest percentage of lexical cohesive device was repetition. repetition exceeded 78,60%, synonym or near synonym was 7,46%, general word exceeded 5,26%, collocation is 7,96% and the lowest one is superordinate 2,48%. Key words: Discourse, Cohesion and Lexical cohesion