A Contrastive Study of Grammatical Cohesion in Selected English and Kurdish News Editorial Discourse

Abstract

The current study conducts a contrastive analysis of the use of grammatical cohesion in English and Kurdish political editorial news discourse. The study draws on insights from systemic functional Linguistic and McCarthy’s (1991) model, as it sounds more comprehensive. The study aims to uncover how English and Kurdish political news editorials make use of
grammatical cohesive devices, reference, conjunction, ellipsis, and substitution, and also which category of these devices is more prominent in the two languages’ political editorial news, explore the aspects of similarities and differences in using these devices. A mixed-method
Design is employed. for achieving the study aim, fifty political editorial news discourses were taken as the data source, purposefully from English and Kurdish newspapers. AntCone software was used to obtain corpus-based quantitative analysis, and then the results were interpreted qualitatively. The findings reveal that these devices are used in the two types of editorials extensively and notably; however, significant differences are observable from the results of data analysis in terms of using grammatical cohesive devices. In Kurdish editorials, grammatical cohesive devices are more frequently used, which is indicated by 539 grammatical devices, while in English editorials, only 409 devices are used. In terms of the categories, references are more commonly used, conjunctions come in the second rank, then substitutions, and finally ellipses, which are underused.
 The frequency and variability of their employment reflect their importance in maintaining text-unity and refined discourse style, and they provide insights to translators, EFL
teachers, News editors, and researchers in this area.