Lexical cohesion in two selected English and Arabic Short stories

Abstract EN

This paper deals with lexical cohesion as an effective means in forming a text.

It analyses the types of lexical cohesive ties in two matched English and Arabic literary texts.

The lexical cohesive ties are investigated within their two main categories: reiteration and collocation.

The paper has come up with some findings from which are those that validate the first three postulated hypotheses like : a) the ratio of reiteration in Arabic literary texts is higher than in English literary texts (84.210 % to 70.10 %), b) the recurrence of Arabic words repetition is higher than that of English (52.226 % to 43.478 %), c) the occurrence of synonymy in English text is higher than that in Arabic texts (15.217 % to 9.716 %).

d)The fourth postulated hypothesis proved invalid: the claim that lexical cohesive ties are denser in English literary texts than in Arabic literary texts.

One of the main objectives of this study rests on the desire of investigating the reliability of cohesion to be applied on Arabic language, not only on English as Halliday and Hasan's 1976 Cohesion in English suggests, and that lexical recurrence is common in English and Arabic.

Other objectives are embodied in its hypotheses.