Lexical cohesive devices in "When you are Old" by William Bulter Yeats

Abstract EN

The present research is a discourse analysis study of lexical cohesive devices in "When you are Old" By William Bulter Yeats.

Cohesive devices are a like a linking words that connect sentence fragments to each other.

Hence, this research aims at identifying the function of lexical cohesive devices in poetry.

And it aims to find the two basic kinds of lexical cohesive devices( reiteration and collocation) in Yeats' poem.

To achieve these aims, the researcher hypothesizes that reiteration is the dominant lexical device in Yeats' poem.

And following Halliday and Hasan's(1976) model of cohesion and qualitative and quantitative methods of research the present research concludes that reiteration and collocation has a significant function in poetry.

Thus, reiteration makes the readers focus on the theme of the poem and it will reinforce the main theme of it.

While collocation will let the readers focus through reading to find the collocate words.

Finally, the statistical analysis has revealed that reiteration is the dominant lexical devices in the selected poem, thus the researcher's hypothesizes is verified.