earticle

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The purpose of this study is to compare the discourse function of English relative pronouns used in ‘news report’ and ‘editorial’ of newspaper. It is assumed that these different registers in newspaper deliver different purpose of discourse respectively. Therefore, it is possible to hypothesize that relative pronouns appearing in newspaper can show different discourse function depending on its discourse purpose. To get this goal, 266 relative pronouns in ‘news report’ and 265 relative pronouns in ‘editorial’ were collected. They are also classified by the types of OS, OO, SS, SO and by restrictive or non-restrictive usage in order to identify discourse functions. The results showed that both ‘news report’ and ‘editorial’ have common characteristics such as the preference of 4 types of relative pronoun and more dominant using of restrictive usage. It is because cognitive language processing ability and discourse functions are applied in most of our language registers. The findings of the study also indicate that different preference of certain type of relative pronouns between ‘news report’ and ‘editorial’ is derived from realizing distinctive discourse purpose. The findings in this study are believed to improve our understanding on specific relative pronouns used in order to reflect discourse functions in accordance with discourse purpose.