1st Analysis: The Limits of Equality by Dr. Cordelia Fine

            In the first sentence of this article, the phrase “Australia’s first female prime minister” immediately catches my attention.  The form of possessive is /Əz/ which indicates possession and is used to highlight the country where Julia Gillard became the first minister. Since Australia is a well-known country, this is a better introductory sentence to catch the reader’s attention rather than just saying that another woman became a prime minister.

Another observation was for the phrase “there are always people who think”, which the author used instead of “there are people who always think”. The first one emphasized the “existence or the number” of these people while the latter stressed the “intensity or way of thinking” of these people. I could only think that the author would like to convey the first message rather than the second. However, it could mean differently based on the reader’s perception. In addition, compound and complex sentences can be seen in the whole article which showed the perspective of the author about limits of equality in relation to her field of expertise.

            This article is a celebration of women’s empowerment and other topics related to gender equality. The use of words in this article helped to convey these messages. Lexical cohesion was achieved through the following ways. First was through the repetition of the words “female” and “women” which showed the main theme of the article. Second, through the use of identical words like fecklessly, ill-advised and ill-equipped which were used to described women’s rights and capabilities before. Third was through inclusion among the terms like prime minister-politics-voting and research-experiments-discovered-evaluated. Fourth was through opposites like heavy-light and people-objects. Last was the association of words like book and sheet that can be seen in the last paragraph of the article where the author sort of advertised her new book.

            For grammatical cohesion, backward reference can be seen in the second sentence of the first paragraph. The word “this” refers to Julia Gillard’s accomplishment. Another two anaphora are the words “they” and “those” of the fourth sentence in the third paragraph. The first refers to the photographed women and the latter refers to the participants mentioned in the preceding sentence. However, CV (curriculum vitae) doesn’t have any reference in the preceding or following text and there is a possibility that some readers may not be aware of its meaning. For conjunction, the phrase “in light of this” in the first paragraph was used to relate the second sentence to the first one. The author also used the interjection “alas” to introduce a research about women’s clothing in the third paragraph.

            In terms of tenses, the first paragraph is in the past tense from the beginning until the end. However, through linguistic clues like “a few months ago” and “a century ago” the time difference of the first, second and third sentence was clarified. On the other hand, the tense of the following paragraphs shifted from one point to another depending on the change of topic by the author. She ended her fourth paragraph using present progressive, this is when she mentioned her new book.

            Since this magazine is more on psychology and the writer herself is a psychologist, all the information provided in this article are all related to science and research. However, to cater the general public, simple words were used instead of highfaluting psychological terms. In sum, this article conforms to the definition of a text since it has a unified whole in terms of register and cohesion.