Minister Chung Hong-Won made a statement to resign from the government. This kind of situation became highlight to mass media since this moment has
newsworthiness and news value. Both national and International mass media published this news all together including The Korea Herald as the daily media in
South Korea and The New York Times as the media outside South Korea. This study focuses on the analysis of the lexical items in the two news-articles
that build the cohesion of each text. Then, after analyzing the cohesion, this study goes further on the media viewpoint of each news article seen from the cohesion. The
example of the data of this study, in The Korea Herald,
“Witnessing the sorrows of those who lost their loved ones and sadness and anger of the people, I felt the right thing for me to do was to take all
responsibility as the prime minister.” The bold and underlined words in the sentence above are the sample of lexical
items which contribute to the cohesion of the text as a form of reiteration. That is the sample of the data in this study.
B. Approach of the Study
This study uses Critical Discourse Analysis CDA as the approach to be applied in this study in order to answer the two problems formulated in this research.
According to Ruth Wodak, CDA regards language as social practice and takes consideration of the context of language use to be crucial. Moreover, CDA takes a
particular interest in the relation between language and ideology 2006: 2. Since this research also concerns with how the lexical choice in the news article can show how
the language is ideological that it contains certain viewpoints in the context of South Korea‟s Prime Minister‟s resignation due to the government‟s bad handling on the
ferry disaster, therefore, Critical Discourse Analysis CDA is considered relevant in this research.
C. Method of the Study
In this part, the writer explains the method used in this research, including the data collection and data analysis. This thesis uses a qualitative method in the analysis
because this study is meant to prove how the analysis of linguistics details, especially the cohesion of the lexical items can show the viewpoint of the media in the issue of
the resignation of South Korea‟s Prime Minister.
1. Data Collection
The writer took the data from two articles from two on-line newspapers; The Korea Herald
and The New York Times. Since this research aims to know the viewpoints of the media about the issue that happened in South Korea about the
resignation of its Prime Minister, the data was purposively taken from the media inside Korea and from outside of Korea. The data of this analysis were in form of
news-article. The steps in collecting the data of this study was first, the writer chose two news-articles about the resignation of the Prime Minister of South Korea. Then
second, the writer divided every news article into smaller subtopics according to the flow of the idea. Third, after dividing the news into some parts with each its own
subtopics, the writer looked for the lexical items which were repeated and were
associated one another. Those lexical items were the data which were analyzed later on the aspect of cohesive force.
2. Data Analysis
There were four steps in conducting this study. The first step was collecting the data. The data were in form of lexical items. The lexical items were collected
according to their number of repetition and their association with the other lexical items. These lexical items were taken from the article as chains of cohesive keywords
representing every smaller subtopic of the texts. Each of news articles has 7 subtopics. The 4 subtopics were same between The Korea Herald and The New York
Times and the 3 subtopics of each news articles were different. The 4 similar
subtopics between the two articles were: the offer of Prime Minister‟s resignation, the statements of the Prime Minister on his resignation, the governmental issue related to
the resignation of the Prime Minister, and the criticism toward the government about
their bad response to the disaster.
The second step after collecting the lexical items, the writer analyzed the cohesion among the lexical item, and then related it with its grammatical cohesion
including reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. Then, the third step after defining the lexical and grammatical cohesion within the texts, the analysis went
further into comparing the semantic features of the lexical items between The Korea Herald
and The New York Times that were repeated and collocated according to the earlier analysis. Then the last step is drawing conclusion about how the viewpoint of
each media were built from the comparison of the meaning of each text which was embodied by their cohesive force.