Grammatical Cohesion in English and Arabic Business Texts: A Contrastive Discoursal Analysis

Abstract

The current study centres around uncovering the functions and types of grammatical cohesion in structuring business texts in English and Arabic newspapers. Unequivocally, it aims to unravel the possible similarities and differences in the English and Arab journalistic registers in terms of grammatical cohesion. Moreover, the study is built on two hypotheses. First, there are differences in the frequencies of grammatical cohesive tools manipulated by English and Arabic writers. Unlike their Arabic counterparts, the English articles tend to involve more realizations of grammatical cohesive patterns. Second, both English and Arabic journalists exhibit a general tendency to take advantage of the same types of grammatical cohesion in their business articles. Ten articles have been selected from The Guardian and Ashareq Al-Awsat newspaper websites as data for analysis. Five articles have been picked from each newspaper. Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) model of grammatical cohesion has been applied to the selected articles in both languages. The results show that reference and conjunction exist profoundly in the two newspapers. On the contrary, substitution and ellipsis have almost disappeared in both corpora.