A Functional Linguistic Analysis of Lexical Cohesion in HIV/AIDS Publications

Abstract

This study examines lexical cohesion in selected HIV/AIDS publications, specifically magazines and flyers, to determine how lexical cohesive devices contribute to clarity, coherence, and textual effectiveness in health communication. Anchored on Bloor and Bloor’s (2004) Functional Linguistics framework, it examines the use of reiteration (repetition, synonymy/near synonymy, and superordination) and collocation (complementaries, antonyms, converses, part–whole, part–part relations, and links) in texts sourced from accredited health bodies, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), Nigeria. Adopting a qualitative and quantitative research design, the study analyzes twenty clauses extracted from three selected texts to identify and categorize lexical cohesive ties. Findings reveal a high frequency of lexical cohesive devices, with reiteration occurring slightly more frequently than collocation. While repetition emerges as the most dominant strategy, serving to emphasize key health messages such as HIV testing, counselling, prevention, and stakeholder engagement, collocational pairs, particularly antonyms and complementaries contribute significantly to meaning-making by making HIV/AIDS discourse cohere and sustain textual meaning. The study underscores the significance of these devices in organizing clear, coherent, and effective healthcare texts. It concludes that lexical cohesion is central to the textualization of HIV/AIDS publications which are shown to be highly cohesive and communicatively potent in educating both infected and affected populations. These findings have implications for the development of more effective health communication materials and highlight the crucial role of lexical cohesion in the communicative effectiveness of public health texts.