【Abstract】Employing the cohesive analysis framework of the systemic functional approach， the paper analyzes the recurrences of propositions in hard news and their replications in the texts’ summaries written by competent readers with a view to investigating the impacts of recurrent propositions of texts on readers’ perceptions of their gists.The results show that the number of times propositions recur in news does not correspond to readers’ perceptions of their degrees of importance to the gists of the texts in which they occur.The study complements the currently mainstream method， the corpus approach， to study phraseology in that it offers a fresh view on the phraseological phenomena occurring in individual texts.
　　【Keywords】 Cohesion； summary； proposition； phraseology
　　1.Introduction
　　The early 1970s saw the emergence of studies on cohesion， that is， studies that explore ‘the way certain words or grammatical features of a sentence can connect that sentence to its predecessors （and successors） in a text’ （Hoey 1991： 3）.Of the studies with research focus being the fifth aspect， only a small number has explored the relationships between cohesion in texts and texts’ aboutness.Hoey （1991） is a landmark study exploring the contributions of patterns of lexis in texts to indicating texts’ main ideas.Chiming with Hoey’s argument， recent years see increasing number of works in the field of corpus linguistics highlighting the contributions of ‘key words’ （see e.g.Scott