A Comparative Study of Using References in English News Published by Jakarta Post and

New York Time

Atik Muhimatun A

atik.ma25@gmail.com

applied liguistics

INTRODUCTION cohesive devices. Fadjrin (2011:3) states

A text or discourse is combining
sentences in a logical way, according to
their meaning and that helps to create unity
for a text. Text is functional language that
has a unified meaning built up from a topic
and purpose. The word “text” refers to any
instance of language, in any medium, that
makes sense to someone who knows the
language. We can produce text, when we
speak or write. Halliday and Hasan
(1976:1) purpose that text can be in the
form of spoken or written. A spoken
language is in the forms of conversation,
speech, storytelling, while written
language is reflected in the forms of
newspaper, magazine, book.
Newspaper has a big influence in daily
life. Newspaper is one form of written
language because the news is presented in
the form of article that consists of
headline, lead, body and conclusion. A
newspaper should be readable and
understandable, so that it should contain of
that cohesion is the most important thing
needed in cohesiveness of a text or
discourse, including in the journalistic text.
It shows that cohesion helps the process of
understanding a text by using its
connective so that the information will be
easy to understand.Within a text, if an item
previously mentioned is referred to again
and dependent with another element, it is
considered a tie or cohesive device.The
cohesive devices are tools that when used
appropriately enable the writer to hang
sentences and text segments together
(Fakeuade and Sharndama, 2012:300-
318). Cohesive device or types of cohesion
consist of five such as reference,
conjunction, substitution, ellipsis, and
lexical cohesion.Cohesive device will help
the participants in interpreting a text.
Cohesion is one of the fundamental
defining characteristics of writing quality.
It occurs when comprehension of one
element is dependent on another within the
text (Halliday and Hasan, 1976 as cited in
Kwan & Yunus, 2014). Cohesion can also
refer to the available means in the surface
forms of the text to signal relations that
hold between sentences or clausal units in
the text (Grabe, 1985 as
Tangkiengsirisin, 2010).
cohesion is the presence or absence of the
linguistic cues in the text that allow the
reader to make connections between ideas
(Scott, Crossley & McNamara,2016).
Cohesion is a relationship
elements of a text where
interpretation and understanding of one
element depends on another. It thus serves
to relate elements of a text to each other.
Reference cohesion functions to retrieve
presupposed information in text and must
be identifiable for it to be considered as
cohesive. In written text, referencing
indicates how the writer
participants and keeps track of them
throughout the text (Eggins
95).There are two general types of
reference: exophoric referencing, which
refers to information from the immediate
context of situation ,and endophoric
referencing, which refers to information
that can be “retrieved” from within the text
.It is this endophoric referencing which is
the focus of cohesion theory. Endophoric
referencing can be divided into two types:
anaphoric ,and cataphoric.
refers to any reference that “points
backwards” to previously
information in text, when the information
needed for the interpretation is in the
preceding portion of the text. Cataphoric
refers to any reference that “points
cited in forward” to information that will be
In addition, presented later in the text, when the
information needed for the interpretation is
to be found in the part of the text that
follows. For cohesion purposes, anaphoric
referencing is the most relevant as it
between “provides a link with a preceding portion
proper of the text” (Halliday and Hasan 1976: 51.(
There are three main types of cohesive
references :personal, demonstrative, and
comparative. Personal reference keeps
track of function through the speech
situation using noun pronouns like “he,
him ,she, her”, etc. and possessive
determiners like “mine, yours, his, hers”,
introduces etc. Demonstrative reference keeps track
of information through location using
1994: proximity references like “this, these, that,
those, here, there, then, and the”.
Comparative reference keeps track of
identity and similarity through indirect
references using adjectives like “same,
equal, similar, different, else, better,
more”, etc. and adverbs like “so, such,
similarly, otherwise, so , more”, etc.
There were many research related with
Anaphoric cohesive device that have been done by
many researchers. Some of those studies
mentioned are conducted by Gorjian (2017)
conducted a study compared and analyzed
the use of references as cohesive devices
in English political news articles written
by American natives and Iranian non-
natives. The data were collected by take
200 news articles from international and
national online newspapers and magazines
were selected from 2011 to 2014. News
articles included 100 on American native
political news and 100 on Iranian non-
native ones. A classification of references
was formulated by Halliday (1994) and
was adapted to form the model for
analyzing the data in the present study.
Hamedi and Hessamy (2013) compare and
contrast the frequency of the use of
cohesive devices in independent and
integrated essays written by 95 upper-
intermediate Iranian EFL learners. The
results revealed that in terms of textual
cohesion, the participants preferred using
anaphoric references to cataphoric
references while substitution and ellipsis in
both independent and integrated sample
writings were rarely used. The students
were also found to be better at using
references and lexical cohesion in their
integrated writings than in their
independent essays.
This study was conducted by using
descriptive comparative research with
quantittive approach. The data were
collected by conducting Simak catat
technique. In getting the data, the
researcher will do the following steps;
first, the researcher collect the data from
online news paper that consist of 6 article ,
second , the researcher read and observe
the article of newspaper, then is identify ad
count the precentage the use of reference
cohesion. The data in this study was
analyzed based on the theory of cohesion
by Halliday and Hasan (1976). This
checklist contains three types of references
concerned with cohesive devices including
demonstrative, comparative and personal
references. The instrument of this study are
the article from the newspaper and human
instrument / the researchers it self as the
tools to analyze the data.
In line with them, the researchers
interested to investigated the use of
cohesive devices as english references in
two article of Jakarta Post and New York
time. As far as the writer knows, this study
is different with the previous study
because this study compare the Indonesian
News and the New York Time news .
These research questions of the present
study are; What are reference used in
english news published by jakarta post,
What are reference used in english news
published by New York Time, What are
the differences of cohesive devices
between Jakarta Post and New York Time.
FINDING AND DISCUSSION Demonstrative References

The most frequent demonstrative reference

Frequency and Percentage of References
was found in political articles written by
The two sets of political articles new york time writers. This category had
investigated in this study were analyzed the frequency of cases in all the two
concerning the frequency of occurrence of groups (34.6% )from Jakarta Post and
references in each of the 3 categories of (39.5%) from New York Time. among
the checklist used in this study. The data which the demonstrative reference “the”
presented in the following tables show the had the highest frequency and clearly
statistics which were obtained after the “that” the least frequency in both Jakarta
analysis of the articles; rows numbered 1-3 Post and New York Time articles.
represent the taxonomy applied here in the
present study. The frequency and Comparative Reference
percentage of all references in each of the This category occurred 4 times in the
two groups (data) of political articles under Jakarta post and 13 times in New York
study are shown under the columns of Time ((5.1%) and (6.6.%) of all the
Jakarta Post and New York Time . Total references). The most frequent type of this
number of references is also given. category was found in articles by New
York Time and clearly the least amount of
Tabel 1. The Distribution of Types of this category was found in articles by
Reference Used in the Source of Data
Jakarta Post writers. Among which, in
So Type of reference T New York Time “so” had the highest and
urc Demo Comp Per ot
N e
T
al “as”, and there is no word “differently”
nstrati arativ son
ot
o of ve e al
al
( and “equally”. Nevertheless, some words
Da %
ta ) that appear in these article are “more’,
1 Jak 34 4 (5.1 40 78 28 “as”, “so”, “better”.
. art (43.6 %) (51. .6
a %) 2% %
Po ) Personal Reference
st
The third category of references in the
2 Ne 77 13 105 19 71
. w (39.5 (6.6% (53. 5 .4 classification of references in the present
Yo %) ) 8% %
study deals with the personal references.
rk )
Ti The overall number occurrence of this
me
category was 40 (51.2%) from Jakarta Post
and New York Time105 (105%) of the
references highlighted in this study. The
most frequent type of this category was
found in articles on politics by New York
Time writers, while the least amount of
this category was found in Jakarta Post
articles.
Chi-Square Analyse
DISCUSSION
The results of this research indicate that
there are five types of cohesive devices
occurs in headline news in the Jakarta
Post. All of the five types of cohesive
devices occur in seven articles of headline
news of the Jakarta Post because all
articles describe or report about someone
or something happened where in the ways
of reporting the events. In presenting the
news, the writer must pay attention to the
language that is used. The writer must be
able to arrange the ideas of each sentence
or paragraph so that the message can be
conveyed well by the readers. Cohesive
devices are crucial in writing for they run
separate clauses, sentences and paragraphs
into connected prose, signaling the
relationship between ideas and making
obvious the thread of meaning the writer is
trying to communicate (Abusaeedi, 2010)
The most frequent types of references
used by New York Time article were
personal references, and the least used
ones were comparative references. For
instance, the following examples show
this phenomenon.
1. The uncertainty is particularly
frustrating for a company like
CalPortland, since its biggest
spending commitments often have
to be made far in advance.
2. And the tax bills have fleeting
components, like the idea of
allowing companies to take the
entire cost of equipment off their
taxable income the year they start
using it. In the House bill, that
provision expires after five years. In
the Senate version, it phases out
gradually after five years and ends
by the 10th year, 2027.
In Jakarta Post articles, the most frequent
items of references were cohesive
references, but the least used items were
demonstrative references. For example, the
use of “he and those” in the following
examples.
CONCLUSION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
 Integrated Writing Tasks.

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