US-China Trade War: Grammatical Cohesion in Malaysian Editorials of The Star

This study investigates how media institutions construct international economic narratives through hard news reporting, focusing on the deployment of grammatical cohesion within newspaper editorials published in Malaysia’s The Star regarding the US-China trade war in October 2025. Grounded in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), the research examines how specific grammatical cohesive devices, namely reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis, contribute to textual coherence and event-framing. Utilizing a targeted corpus of selected news reports from this critical temporal window, the analysis maps out the distribution and functional deployment of cohesive ties within the discourse of global trade conflict. The study argues that despite the informational register and perceived objectivity characteristic of news reporting, cohesive choices are not value-neutral features of textual organization. Instead, they function as active discursive resources that trace structural event chains, connect economic incidents to specific causal relations, and implicitly frame the geopolitical roles of the United States, China, Malaysia, and ASEAN. Ultimately, the findings demonstrate that grammatical cohesion operates as a latent structural mechanism in print journalism, transforming standard sentence-level lexicogrammatical options into a vehicle for constructing socio-political and economic meaning under the guise of objective information delivery.

Grammatical Cohesion, Systemic Functional Linguistics, US-China Trade Dispute, Media Discourse, Opinion Columns.

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