| Cohesion, as one of the most important studies of textual research, contributes a lot to the coherence of a discourse. It has aroused the interest of many scholars and linguists ever since the cohesion theory was first proposed by Halliday and Hasan in 1976. Cohesion relations can be divided into two categories—grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Lexical cohesion, which is considered as the most principle one in various cohesive means, can be achieved by different lexical items in discourses. Many scholars have done significant researches on lexical cohesion. However, few of the studies focus on how lexical cohesion is applied in the Review of Maritime Transport. Thus, the present study aims at investigating how lexical cohesion is used in this register.The distribution of different lexical cohesive devices in the Review of Maritime Transport is analysed by examining the frequency of each devices in all the samples from 2000 to 2009. It is found that among the five lexical cohesive devices, repetition proved to be the most frequently used device in the Review of Maritime Transport with the other four devices ranking in a descending order:(near)-synonymy, antonymy, collocation and superordinate. By comparing the result obtained in this paper with previous studies, we can draw a conclusion that lexical cohesion is applied differently in different registers, finally, leading to an awareness of how we should use lexical cohesion to make the reading of the Review of Maritime Transport efficient and proficient. |
