6. Conclusion
The article by David Cole is a prototypical written text. The author has made the main part of the text impersonalized in order to create a feeling of objectivity. The concluding paragraphs become more personalized and reveal the author’s opinion with the repeated usage of grammatical cohesive devices (personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’) which create a feeling of solidarity between the author and the audience. The author has constructed a negative attitude in the text by choosing words with negative connotations which are amplified by synonyms carrying the same negative meanings. The semantic fields of Effect, Pressure, Offense, and Prevention are used throughout the text to support the controlling idea. To make the text more cohesive, lexical cohesive devices have been used, e.g., repetition of words and their synonyms (insult; offend; deride); usage of co-references (“hate speech”; the term); usage of antonyms (permissible; impermissible). The author has also used numerous evaluative expressions (e.g. ‘[…] because of its offensive content’; ‘[…] examples of ill-advised enforcement; etc.) to give criticism to the modern usage of ‘free speech’. Cole lays most of his claim on expertise and authority which makes his standing more prominent and his arguments more respectable. The text is of high lexical density.…
