The Role of Cohesive Devices and the Interplay of Theme and Rheme in Consolidating the Argument of Krauthammer's Free-lunch Egalitarianism.

Ever since they were introduced by Halliday and Hasan (1976), cohesive devices have been used as an instrument of analysis in a plethora of research papers that have investigated a variety of textual types. The reason behind using the 1976-model of cohesion in textual analysis is that it is probably the most comprehensive account of cohesive ties to-date. Of equal importance are the notions of Theme and Rheme since the interplay of these components has a major effect in analysing different genres. This paper espouses a micro-analytic approach, text-based analysis to explore the role of cohesive devices and the interplay of Theme and Rheme in reinforcing arguments found in newspaper editorials. Specifically, this paper analyses Krauthammer's Free-lunch Egalitarianism in terms of the author's employment of grammatical and lexical cohesive devices and Theme and Rheme variations to support his argument. Following the textual analysis, the paper concludes with a number of implications that the textual analysis can have on education, particularly the teaching of writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]