LEXICAL COHESION IN PERSIAN AND ENGLISH PSYCHOLOGICAL ARTICLES ABSTRACTS

Lexical cohesion is a property of text, achieved through lexical semantic relations between words in text. Most information retrieval systems make use of lexical relations in text only to a limited extent. The purpose of this study was to compare the frequency and the degree of the use of different types of lexical cohesion in English and Persian article abstracts journals of psychology. The framework utilized for the analysis of lexical cohesion is the one employed by Halliday and Hasan (1976) in cohesion in English and Halliday (1985). Forty psychological abstract texts (20 from each language) were selected. To have an equal amount of data in English and Persian, the first 100 words from each text were analyzed. The texts were also in the same field; i.e. clinical psychology. The statistical tool of the Chi-Square Test was used to determine whether there was a significant difference among the lexical cohesion devices in both groups of English and Persian texts. The observed chi-square value proved to be significant only in the case of synonym. Based on these findings, it was concluded that repetition and synonym were more frequent than other devices in both English and Persian texts; of course they were denser in English than that of Persian. The frequency of other lexical cohesion devices was almost the same in both corpora.