Grammatical Cohesion in Three Children Short Stories by Aesop

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyze the grammatical cohesion used in the three famous children short story entitled ‘The Ant and The Grasshopper’, The Lion and The Mouse’ and ‘The Tortoise and The Hare’, by Aesop. This study used descriptive qualitative method to describe the grammatical cohesion found in the stories. The unit analysis of this study is every clause using cohesive devices found in the short stories. The data in the form of children short stories were taken from the website of https://americanliterature.com. The framework proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1994) was used to analyze the data. The steps to analyze the data are reading the whole texts, identifying and categorizing the grammatical cohesive devices used in them, then analyzing the finding to show what grammatical cohesive devices are mostly used and also to show whether the texts are cohesive or not. The results showed that the most dominant cohesive devices used in the three children short stories by Aesop are reference then followed by conjunction. Most references and conjunctions used in the short stories are used correctly to make the texts cohesive.