Lexical Cohesion in Arabic Reading Texts: A Systemic Functional Analysis of a Grade X Madrasah ʿĀliyah Textbook

Abstract

Lexical cohesion constitutes one of the linguistic resources that contributes to the construction of discourse coherence through semantic relations among lexical units. From the perspective of text linguistics, lexical cohesion is understood as a linguistic mechanism that establishes topical continuity and semantic integration within a text. This study aims to map the distribution of lexical cohesion devices in Grade X Arabic reading texts used in Madrasah ʿĀliyah based on the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The study employed a quantitative descriptive approach using content analysis techniques. The research data consisted of eight reading texts taken from the Grade X Arabic textbook published by the Ministry of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia. The analysis was conducted through the stages of identification, classification, quantification, and description of five lexical cohesion devices: repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and collocation. The findings reveal that lexical cohesion is predominantly realized through repetition, accounting for 75.7%, followed by collocation at 14.56% and hyponymy at 8.25%, whereas synonymy at 0.97% and antonymy at 0.48% occur less frequently. The predominance of repetition indicates that lexical cohesion in the analyzed texts relies mainly on direct lexical recurrence, which functions as an explicit mechanism for maintaining topical continuity and referential consistency throughout the discourse.