The comparisons of cohesive devices used in online football news published by Jakarta Post and Guardian

Cohesive devices have significant roles in a discourse. Guy Cook (1989) explains that these devices function as formal links that connect sentences and clauses (p.14), creating cohesion and coherence throughout the discourse. In other words, cohesive devices help discourse to have unity – one of the features of discourse as a language in use for communication. There are seven cohesive devices proposed by Cook (1989:15-21). These devices consist of referring expressions, repetitions, conjunctions, parallelism, substitutions, ellipsis, and verb forms. Cook further classifies discourse into two categories: spoken and written (1989:50). An example of written discourse that today’s society is familiar with is online football news. It is due to the fact that football is loved worldwide and the sport section of lots of online newspapers in the world appoints football as the main sport event to be reported and presented for the readers. As a form of a written discourse, online football news articles are constructed using lots of cohesive devices to maintain cohesion and coherence among their sentences and clauses so that the messages delivered by the journalists can be understood perfectly by the readers. The researcher intended to figure out the contributions of these devices in the making of online football news and how journalists utilize them. Therefore, he compiled six online football news articles from Jakarta Post and six other from Guardian as his data source. He analyzed the cohesive devices used in the data source and compared their contributions between the ones in the data source of Jakarta Post and the ones in Guardian. As the result, in the data source of Jakarta Post, substitutions were not identified at all, whereas in the one of Guardian, all devices were recognized. Repetitions, conjunctions, referring expressions can be considered as the devices with major usage and the most significant impact, while parallelism, ellipsis, and substitutions can be considered as the ones with minor usage. Past tenses, especially simple past, influenced the majority of verb forms in the data source; however, there were other tenses with minor usage found such as simple present, present perfect, simple future, present continuous, and present perfect continuous