A Discourse Study of Cohesive Devices Used in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Articles

ABSTRACT

This study is focused on analyzing the cohesive devices used in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Articles in which the devices function as a way of getting text “hang together” as a whole as well as indicators of text unity. The organization of those devices are categorized as cohesion which is also considered as one of the elemets helps the readers to be able to percept and interpret language well especially written form. For that reason, this study is intended to describe the categories of cohesive devices used in the articles of Universal Declaration of Human Rights and how the cohesive devices contribute to the connectedness and unity within the text of the articles.

This research is a descriptive qualitative research. In this study, the data sources are the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which consists of thirty articles. All of the articles are going to be analyzed based on Halliday and Hasan’s theory of cohesive devices.

The results of the study show the categories of cohesive devices: grammatical cohesion; reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction and lexical cohesion; reiteration which includes repetition, hyponym, metonym, and antonym and collocation used in the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Articles. And describe the principle of cohesion used to the relevance of connectedness and unity within the articles both through grammatical and lexical relations.

It is expected that this research is helpful for teachers, writers, students, and other professions who have intension to construct more qualified and reasoning utterances, writing, literary works or any other production especially to written form of language to achieve their purposes. And for further research, it would be better to use different and more corpuses with the meaning interpretation achievement as the objective of the study.