The study examined the interplay between language and culture
based on the cohesive devices employed by the writer in three speech
communities: Singapore, the Philippines, and the US. Specifically, it
sought to answer the following: (I) what cohesive devices are commonly employed by the three speech communities in written discourse; (2) what prevail as the norms of written discourse in these speech communities in terms of cohesive device use; (3) at what points are the norms in these speech communities parallel/contrasting; and (4) what cultural features are revealed by the prevailing norms? Data analyzed were 30 selected articles from Views/ Comments/Analysis/ Opinions section of The Straits Times (Singapore), Philippine Daily Inquirer (Philippines), and The International Herald Tribune (US), published from July-August 2002. Frequency and percentage counts were employed to determine the patterns. Results revealed that the rhetorical pattern of the three speech communities in the genre examined were built on adversative relations. Further, cohesive devices occupied three positions in discourse: within the sentence, between sentences and between paragraphs. Structural and semantic relations were also identified Finally, the three speech communities were found lo be analytic rather than accumulative, individualist rather than collectivist.