Lexical Cohesion found in the lyric of Adele’s Songs

ABSTRACT

Lexical cohesion is one of the important element to construct unity from one word to another word. This is also to know how the relationship of every word can be united in the text. Lexical cohesion is the central devices for making texts hang together. Lexical cohesion gives the most substantive contribution to the text. The use of lexical cohesion will help the reader to get the understanding of the lyrics easily.

This research focuses on lexical cohesion found in the lyric of 21 album of Adele’s songs. The reason for choosing the lyric of Adele’s songs as the object of research is because there are reiteration and collocation in the lyric, the words are not monotonous, simple meaningful and the content is about relationship. This study examines the types and the function of lexical cohesion on the lyric of Adele’s songs. This research uses descriptive qualitative method since the data are in the form of words, phrases, and sentences. The data is taken from 21 album of Adele they are: Someone Like You, Take It All, Set Fire To The Rain I’ll Be Waiting, One And Only.

To analyze the data the researcher takes the data which consist of reiteration and collocation that are used in the lyrics of Adele’s songs, and explain the function of lexical cohesion in those lyrics. The research finds lexical cohesion occurs in almost every line of the lyric, fewer examples of repetition, subordinate, hyponymy and antonymy. Examples of repetition are found, followed by an example of hyponym data.

Based on the findings of the study, the writer concludes that lexical cohesion which consist of reiteration and collocation is used in the lyrics of Adele’s songs and each kind of lexical cohesion has different function. Lexical cohesion has different function. The function of lexical cohesion (repetition) is to give confirmative explanation, inform, describe, strengthen, convince, express and stress the narrator’s main idea in the lyric. The function of (hyponym) is to indicate the categories of something. However, the general function of lexical cohesion is to collaborate the word of the text in order to produce a good coherence in presenting the text, and the text will be interesting and easy to understand eventhough when it is expressed in different way.

Finally, it is suggested for the next researchers to analyze the same subject (Adele’s lyric) by using another theory such as Martin’s lexical cohesion theory as reference and comparison that might be relevant source.