This study investigates lexical cohesion in four selected song lyrics from Maher Zain's second studio album Forgive Me (2012): Forgive Me, I Love You So, Number One for Me, and My Little Girl. Adopting Halliday 23.5%), synonym (28 items; 11.8%), hyponym (26 items; 10.9%), antonym (23 items; 9.7%), meronym (19 items; 8.0%), and superordinate (15 items; 6.3%). Among the four songs, My Little Girl yields the highest number of lexical cohesion items (66 items; 27.7%). The dominance of collocation reflects the formulaic devotional register characteristic of Islamic nasheed, distinguishing Maher Zain’s lyrics from mainstream pop music where repetition typically dominates. These findings confirm that Maher Zain’s song lyrics operate as linguistically cohesive discourses that employ diverse lexical mechanisms to achieve semantic unity and emotional impact.
Puspita et al. (Wed,) studied this question.