LEXICAL COHESION

Halliday and Hasan

Textual cohesion

According to Halliday and Hasan, textual cohesion is a semantic concept which refers to meaning relationships within the text. These relationships define the text as a text. (Koch, p. 17)Cohesion is part of a language system. Although it is regarded as a semantic relationship, it is established through the lexico-grammatical system.Since it establishes semantic relationships, cohesion is related to the semantic resources through which a sentence is linked to the previous one.

Lexical cohesion

Lexical cohesion is the cohesive effect achieved by selection of the vocabulary.General nouns: a class of nouns on the borderline between grammatical e lexical cohesion, i.e. a borderline case between a lexical item (member of an open set) and a grammatical item (member of a closed system). The term bordeline case refers to the fact that there is no sharp line between them, which happens exactly because there is no sharp line between grammar and vocabulary.General nouns comprise a small set of nouns having generalized reference within two major classes. (Eg.: people, person, thing, stuff, etc.)

General nouns

A general noun in cohesive function is almost always accompanied by na anaphoric THE. When it happens, it functions like an anaphoric reference item. (E.g.: Marcos has been working a lot. The poor boy is worn out.)Some general nouns express a particular attitude on the part of the speaker (idiot, fool, devil, the stupid thing, etc.). They are an expression of interpersonal meaning.They convey familiarity as opposed to distance. Just a few general nouns (as the ones in the example above) have this interpersonal element as part of their meaning.

General nouns

According to Halliday: From a grammatical point of view the combination of general noun plus specific determiner, such as the man, the thing, is very similar to a reference item. There is little difference between it seems to have made little impression on the man and it seems to have made very little impression on him: in both instances interpretation is possible only by reference to something that has gone before. But it is not the case that there is no difference at all: the form with general noun the man, opens up another possibility, that of introducing na interpersonal element into the meaning, which is absent in the case of the personal pronoun. [pp.275, 276]

Reiteration

Reiteration is a form of lexical cohesion which involves the repetition of a lexical item or the use of a general word to refer back to a lexical item, as well as a number of things in between: synonym, near-synonym, or a superordinate (Eg.: a car is a superordinate of a Mercedes).For reiteration to take place, it is not necessary that the second item repeats the first one. By the same token, it is not necessary for two lexical occurences to have the same referent in order for them to be cohesive.

Superordinates

In English the words animal and dog are related in such a way that dog refers to the type of animal, and animal is a general term that includes dog and other types of animal. The specific term, dog, is called a hyponym, and the general term, animal, is called a superordinate.A superordinate term can have many hyponyms. For example: vehicle: bus car lorry van

Cohesive patterns

A lexical item coheres with a preceding occurence of the same item irrespective of the fact that they have the same referent.The second occurence may be identical, inclusive, exclusive, or unrelated. [p. 283]Therefore, reference is irrelevant for lexical cohesion, since the cohesive force set up by two occurences of a lexical item does not happen by virtue of any referential relation.

Collocations

Collocation is when cohesion is achieved through the association of lexical items that regularly co-occur.Collocation results from the possibility of cohesion between any pair of lexical items which are in some way associated to each other in the language. There is a very marked cohesive force deriving from the occurence in proximity with each other of pairs such as: laugh...joke; ill...doctor; try...succeed; bee...honey, etc.Two lexical items having similar patterns of collocation which tend to appear in similar contexts will generate a cohesive force if they occur in adjacent sentences.

Collocations

All lexical cohesion that is not covered by what we have called reiteration will be put under the general heading of collocation.In this case, cohesion results from the co-occurence of lexical items that are in some way typically associated because they tend to occur in similar environments.Collocational cohesion poses special difficultty because it is hard to estimate, differently from grammatical cohesion, in which reference items, substitutes and conjunction clearly pressupose some element rather than themselves.