The analysis of cohesion in Obama’s speech text “Time Has Come to Reaffirm Our Enduring Spirit

When people speak or write, they produce text which can be identified as the tool for communication where spoken and written forms are applied in the real life. One of spoken forms which has big influence is speech, where it has purpose to reveal idea, thought and persuade the other people to do something. In spoken and written text, cohesion is one important component to constructs and makes the text effective and efficient which make the reader or the hearer easier to understand it. Cohesion is one of part in discourse. To create a good speech, the speaker must use a good cohesive to get a good link. The purposes of the study are to find out the types of Cohesion are constructed in Obama’s speech text “Time Has Come to Reaffirm Our Enduring Spirit” which focused in Reference, Conjunction and Lexical Cohesion. This study is qualitative descriptive study, where the data sources are Obama’s speech text and the data is about cohesion. Then, they are identified and analyzed based on what Gerot and Wignell particularly exemplified. The results of the analysis shows that there are 177 reference which consist of 34 Homophora, 116 Anaphora and 30 Cataphora; 73 Conjunction which consist of 47 additive, 14 comparative, 3 temporal and 9 consequential; and 565 Lexical Cohesion which consist of 426 Repetition, 35 Synonymy, 79 Antonym, 4 Hyonymy and 21 Meronymy. From the results, we can see that Anaphora, Additive, and Repetition are dominant in each types of Cohesion. It means this text has good cohesion. Due to fact the Cohesion is on point to create a good spoken or written text, it is suggested for the Students, Lectures, Teachers, and for the readers to learn more about Discourse Analysis especially Cohesion