AN ANALYSIS OF LEXICAL COHESION USED IN JOE BIDEN’S SPEECH ON CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

ABSTRACT Lexical cohesion could provide relationships between words in the text so that readers could easily understand the text and the meaning of the text. In addition, each type of lexical cohesion could play an important role in conveying the meaning of the text. The objectives of this study were to find out the kinds of lexical cohesion used and the most dominant type of lexical cohesion in Joe Biden’s speech on coronavirus pandemic. Descriptive qualitative method was applied in order to find out the result of data analysis. The data in this study was in the form of speech consisting of speech scripts, the speech from Joe Biden on coronavirus pandemic that consisting of 96 sentences in the script. The research was analyzed using theory from Halliday and Hasan to find out the types of lexical cohesion. The techniques of data analysis were done by data reduction, data display, and drawing conclusion. To see the dominant kind of lexical cohesion, this research used percentage and counted it manually. The results of this research showed that in the data, there were 5 types of lexical cohesion with the sum of the types of repetition that was 61 items or 53%, synonym with 15 items or 13%, superordinate there were 5 items or 4%, general word with 4 items or 3%, and the last was collocation with 31 items or 27%. The most dominant type of lexical cohesion used in the speech was repetition. Keyword: Cohesion, Lexical Cohesion, Speech, Qualitative Researc