A study of grammatical cohesion of Barack Obama’s speech in Al-Azhar University

ABSTRACT

Grammatical cohesion is one of the kinds of cohesive device which relates to the internal structure of ties or devices which are used to relate words, clauses, and sentences in a text. Grammatical cohesion is classified into four devices; reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction.

This study examines a grammatical cohesion of Barack Obama’s speech in Al-Azhar University. This study aims at; (1) finding out the kinds of grammatical cohesion used by Barack Obama’s speech in Al-Azhar University, (2) finding out the function of grammatical cohesion which is used by Barack Obama’s speech in Al-Azhar University.

Descriptive qualitative design is applied to analyze the data. The data sources of the study are the text of Barack Obama’s speech in Al-Azhar University. The data are analyzed based on Halliday and Hasan’s theory of grammatical cohesion and Renkema’s theory of the function of grammatical cohesion.

The results of this study show that all kinds of grammatical cohesion namely reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction are found in the text of Barack Obama’s speech in Al-Azhar University. The function of those grammatical conjunction are; (1) to indicate reference pronoun, (2) to indicate spatial order, (3) to substitute a similar noun, (4) to omit the similar noun, (5) to indicate conclusion or summary, and (6) to indicate contrast.

After conducting this study, it is expected to give valuable contribution to the language users; speakers and writers. This study can be used as additional information in learning and applying good grammatical cohesion especially in the speech text. Moreover, this study also expected will be useful for the next researchers who interested in doing similar study and for those who have a great attention to the cohesion in both of written and spoken text.