An Analysis of Lexical Cohesion in the Text “After Twenty Years”

Abstract

Lexical cohesion plays an important role in forming a discourse, which effectively connects different part of the text and contributes to the main idea. In terms of short stories, lexical cohesion aims to linguistically enhance plot description, image building and theme expression. This study investigates the lexical devices in the short story After Twenty Years written by O. Henry. By means of discourse analysis, it turns out that O. Henry takes advantage of both reiteration and collocation. For one thing, four kinds of lexical cohesion, including repetition, synonym or near-synonym, superordinate, and general word, are all used in the text to form lexical cohesion. For another, multiple collocation chains manage to integrate the scene, the characters, and the plot from different dimensions. The overall result shows that the short story is highly cohesive, which largely makes it a great work around the world.