The study on the frequency of cohesive devices encountered in the headline articles of the Indonesian daily news

For most people, newspapers are as valuable as carriers of news. They are valuable for other reasons too. With their wide variety of text-types and language styles, newspaper are good basis for language study. In this thesis, the writer is interested to bring into view the order of cohesive devices in the area of journalism, in this case, the headline articles of the newspaper considering that whenever the readers take a glance of a newspaper, it is undeniable that it is always the headline articles that the readers first notice. This is not surprising as it mostly constitutes the most dramatic and interesting news section of the paper. Taking this into account, the writer decided to take the headline articles of a newspaper as the object of the analysis. Even though a number of previous studies in investigating the cohesive devices in different fields have formerly been executed by Hanna ( 1980), Puteri (1988), Djunaidi (1989), Kho (1989), Khornomo (1992), Anggraeni (1996), however, it is noteworthy that the number of the analysis of the cohesive devices encountered in the area of journalism is still worth questioning. Correspondingly, the writer is in a deep interest in revealing it. A good composition is to possess five ultimate general elements, namely; grammar, content, form, style and mechanics. The mastery of cohesive devices, which is included in grammar, constitutes one of the essential qualities of a good paragraph. Mastering the elements of cohesion, namely; reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion will facilitate the writer in expressing his idea smoothly and continuously as it bridges the thought gaps among sentences within paragraph. The mastery of cohesive devices also enables both writer and reader focusing where the core of each paragraph is flowing. As a result, the well-maintained and logically related sentences would be an advantage for both parties in gaining the essence of communication as the possibility of misunderstanding could be minimized to zero point. In this case, the writer chooses The Indonesian Daily News for the sample of his study due to the interest that it is the only foreign-language media issued from Surabaya. In order to keep the objectivity of the research, the sampling of the eight headline articles was executed randomly from the March and April issues. In the other words, it resulted in four articles issued in March and the other four articles issued in April. After a careful analysis of the articles, it was finally discovered that the total number of the cohesive devices items found was 1270 times with this following order: reference occupied the first place with the total number of 537 times or as high as 42.28%, followed by lexical cohesion in the second place with the total occurrences of 477 times or 37.55%. The third was conjunction with the total number of 168 times or 13.22%, followed by the subdivision of ellipsis with the total occurrences of 88 times or as much as 6.92%. The last subdivision of cohesive devices namely substitution was surprisingly not at all detected. This is quite a phenomenon which the writer suggests that further studies on the same object be performed in order to arrive on a more accurate generalization