A discourse analysis of grammatical and lexical cohesion in Ghostbusters: Afterlife

This study investigated what types of grammatical and lexical cohesion that the protagonist, Phoebe Spengler, uses in the conversations of film Ghostbusters: Afterlife (Reitman, 2021). The study is primarily qualitative and partly quantitative in nature. 586 sentences selected as study samples from the Ghostbusters: Afterlife film transcript were analyzed for cohesive ties using Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy and framework. In terms of grammatical cohesion, reference (77.14%) was the most frequently used, followed by conjunction (15.24%), ellipsis (4.75%) and substitution (2.86%). In terms of lexical cohesion, repetition (64.86%) was the most frequently used, followed by collocation (27.03%), general word (4.05%), synonym (2.7%), and superordinate (1.35%). These results imply that the frequency of cohesive ties depends on the choices of the protagonist in a film narrative. Recommendations are made for pedagogical practice and future work.