Lexical cohesion refers to the cohesive effect of the use of lexical items in dis-course where the choice of an item relates to the choices that have gone before.
We have already seen in the analysis of Text 5B (Section 5.2) that words that are associated in meaning can form cohesive chains and, moreover, a text may well have more than one cohesive chain running through it. We now look in a little more detail at the types of associative meaning that are possible between lexical items.
One important type of lexical cohesion, probably the one with the strongest cohesive force, is repetition (or reiteration) of the same item. Thus, if a per-son’s name is mentioned more than once (as is the name Hogarth in Text 5F), the reader will recognize the link in a chain of information connected with that person. Synonyms and near synonyms can have the same effect as can other words which refer to the same person. In other parts of the book from which Text 5F was taken, for example, Hogarth is referred to as the boy and the farmer’s son. Where the cohesive chain has the same referent, it is termed an identity chain. This type of chain is arguably the strongest type of lexical cohesion and it has much in common with reference.
Nevertheless, for cohesion to occur, it is not necessary for each word in a chain to refer to the same entity or even to belong to the same word class. All the words related to the root pollen play a part in the cohesion of (20).
(20) A flower cannot produce seeds until it is pollinated and its ovule fertilized.
Pollination is the transfer of pollen from the male parts (stamens) to the female parts (stigmas) of a flower. If pollen is carried to the stigma of the same flower, it is called self-pollination.
Example (20) also includes examples of re-iteration of flower and stigma.
Later in the same text, we find further use of the word seeds and also refer-ence to plants, a word which stands in a superordinate relationship with flower, and then to grasses, a word in a subordinate relationship to plants.
Cohesive ties 99
Near-synonyms can sometimes be quite difficult to pin down in a text.
However, a good example of how they are used came in a newspaper report of floods in France and Holland, which reported the fact that many families had been forced to leave their homes. This short piece contained the words left, exodus, abandoned, deserted, evacuated, moved, all of which entail the core meaning of leave.
As well as synonyms, words from mutually exclusive categories (such as male and female or hot and cold) or words with opposite and contrastive meanings (antonyms) can have a cohesive effect.
Another type of lexical relationship which is often cohesive is termed col-location. Collocation covers two or more words which can be said to ‘go together’ in the sense of frequency of occurrence. If words commonly occur in the same text and we are frequently exposed to their co-occurrence, we come to expect them together. Traditionally, for example, children’s stories with a princess in them usually ended up with a prince in them as well, although the prince and princess collocation is an example of an association that may well be changing with more egalitarian approaches to children’s lit-erature.
One aspect of collocation that we need to remember is that words collocate differently in different registers. The word cone, for example, collocates with angle, cross-section, base and circle in a geometry textbook, but with ice cream in the context of a children’s holiday. Similarly, the word data would collocate with bank, processing, and storage in the field of computer applica-tions, but spoken and written in applied linguistics.
One of the most important types of lexical cohesion concerns the use of general nouns. These are nouns that have very general all-embracing mean-ings; they form a class of high level superordinates. Some extreme examples of words that can be used as general nouns (although they are not always used in this way) are the words thing, person, people, place, plant, and idea. With words such as these, a speaker or writer can create a cohesive link with almost any previously mentioned entity, as for example in (21) where ideas acts as an all-embracing word that coheres with much of the substance of the previous text.
(21) The ideas outlined above should provide the basis for the practical analysis of texts.
A special class of general nouns called anaphoric nouns (A-nouns) are words that are used to talk about on-going discourse and sum up or refer back to sec-tions in a text. Individual anaphoric nouns include such words as accusation, criticism, account, analysis, but there are many such words in English. These nouns are extremely important in academic writing where they can be used as a device to connect a previously discussed topic with either New information or a new topic in an argument, as we can see from the examples in (22).
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(22a) This explanation has been challenged by [. . .]
(22b) The controversy outlined in the first section is [. . .]
(22c) However, serious questions have been raised about even the few proposals in the first chapter.
Nouns like these, which are used to refer to other sections of the current dis-course (metadiscoursally), are often used together with pre-modifying anaphoric devices like Deictics (the, this, these) or post-modifying expres-sions which refer the reader to the text (such as outlined above, in the previ-ous chapter, given earlier).
In short, lexical cohesion involves meaningful connections in text that are created through the use of lexical items and that do not intrinsically involve reference, substitution, ellipsis or conjunction.
Summary
This chapter has tried to make the case that texts have texture as a result of a complex interaction of linguistic resources which are used by writers and speakers to construct coherence. These resources include the information structure (organization of Given and New information) and the thematic structure (Theme and Rheme) at clause level and also the way in which thematic patterns (thematic progression) are built up from clause to clause through a text. The thematic structure of the text is supported by the cohesive component of the grammar, which consists of reference, ellipsis and substitution, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Although we may analyze each of these elements separately, there is likely to be a blending of many cohesive elements in any stretch of genuine discourse except in very short or abbreviated texts.
Further study
IFG, Chapter 9 provides a fuller account of text and texture, which makes explicit links to wider aspects of the grammar and introduces the theory that there are logogenetic patterns in text. These patterns relate not only to Thematic patterns such as we have examined in this chapter but also to mood, polarity, process type, etc., as well as other strata such as the phonological patterns in a spoken or poetic text, in fact the entire meaning potential of the language.
Eggins (1994) has an interesting discussion of Theme and includes a net-work representing the system choices for Theme that we have discussed in this chapter.
The major work in the area of cohesion is Halliday and Hasan (1976), which still provides the fullest account of cohesive ties in English. Halliday Further study 101
and Hasan (1989) deals with aspects of text and cohesion from an explicitly social semiotic perspective, and Halliday and Matthiessen (1999) – a difficult book to dip into – bring a broader theoretical perspective to the topic. Martin (1992) is the most detailed work on text analysis, introducing many factors that lack of space has forced us to neglect.
Hoey (1983, 1991) develops Halliday and Hasan’s account to investigate how cohesive features combine to organize long stretches of text. In his earlier work, he considers cohesion in relation to some important patterns of rhetori-cal organization. In his later work, he looks in detail at cohesive chains and the significance of repetition. Hoey continues to make important contributions to functional theory, including ideas on the role of the sentence (as distinct from clause), which he suggests may be ‘a part grammatical, part textual phenome-non’, a view that is compatible with much of the literature on the topic.
For samples of text analysis, see Mann and Thompson (1992). This unusual book incorporates quite distinct analyses of the same text by twelve distin-guished linguists, including Halliday. A further example of analysis by Halliday of a text from Charles Darwin, demonstrates how the interaction of Given and New with Thematic progression underpins the rhetorical value of the discourse (Halliday and Martin, 1993: Chapter 5). Two excellent mono-graphs on lexical cohesion are Tadros (1981) and Francis (1986). A good introduction to general aspects of textuality, relating grammar to various reg-isters, can be found in Hillier (2004).
Although much of what has been discussed in this chapter is applicable to spoken discourse, space has prevented any detailed discussion of spoken text, and most of the examples of spoken interaction have been taken from drama (Oscar Wilde) rather than natural conversation.
A good introduction to spoken discourse can be found in Coulthard (1985), which includes the role of intonation, and more advanced studies are reported in Coulthard (1992).
Much has been written on the question of how far cohesive elements can account for coherence in discourse, and how far linguistic description can help us understand it. Work on domain models and genre models of discourse provides increasing evidence for the importance of social expectation and rhetorical structures in text as factors in coherence. Some discussions in the areas of philosophy and pragmatics relate to the matters discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Of particular interest is work on shared assumptions (mutual knowl-edge) and frames and schemata. Other work is concerned with the psycho-logical processes involved in comprehension (for example, so-called top-down and bottom-up text processing) and the psychological conditions necessary for human communication to take place at all (communicative prin-ciples or maxims). Introductions can be found in Brown and Yule (1983) and Mey (1993). Jaworski and Coupland (1999) is a useful collection of articles, some of which relate to these matters.
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Hewings’ (1999) work on sentence initial structures in students’
geography essays is relevant to work of Theme, and McCabe (1999) productively compared thematic structures in English and Spanish history textbooks. Comparisons of texts in different languages in terms of features of textuality are an increasing research area with applications to translation and teaching.
Gledhill’s work (2000) on the genre of research articles focuses on the use of collocation and the unfolding of grammatical metaphor in science. Gledhill makes the interesting claim, based on his empirical research, that ‘words are chosen not simply for the information they bring along, but also for their long-range ability to signal textual relations’.
Exercises
Exercise 5.1
(a) Identify the Themes in Text 5H and say whether each is marked or unmarked.
(b) Find two examples from the text of nominal groups with articles which do not have nouns as Head. Are these elliptical groups? Give reasons for your answer.
(c) Comment on the cohesive ties formed by the following pronouns: she (sentence 2); they (sentences 4 and 5).
(d) List two lexical chains in the text.
Exercises 103
Once upon a time, there lived a rich merchant who had three beautiful daughters. The youngest was the prettiest of the three and she was also good and kind to everyone. Her elder sisters were also quite attractive but they were neither good or kind. They were greedy and extremely selfish.
Text 5H
Exercise 5.2
Text 5I on the subject of time and the calendar has a somewhat complex the-matic pattern. Try to identify the type of thethe-matic progression used by the author. Is it constant, derived, linear or split Rheme or a combination of more than one pattern? (Note: Ignore the clause beginning the earth.)
Exercise 5.3
Identify cases of substitution or ellipsis in each of the following pairs of sen-tences:
1. Is the contract severable? If so, is the agreement valid?
2. In the recent national emergency, fifteen people were killed. Five are still missing.
3. The answer to this problem can be reached by two paths: the short one and the long one. Both in my judgement are satisfactory.
4. Outside, the sleet had turned to rain. The car radio said more was forecast.
Exercise 5.4
Read the following old joke about the man who visited his doctor and explain the cohesive ambiguity. Why is such a breakdown in communication unlikely in real life?
Man: Doctor, a crab bit my toe.
Doctor: Which one?
Man: I don’t know, all crabs look alike to me.
Exercise 5.5
Find two short texts from different sources (for example, a letter and an intro-duction to an essay, or a report and a recipe) and compare the ways texture is created in each text.
Notes
1. Speight, K. 1943: Teach Yourself Italian. London: English University Press Ltd.
2. Lott, Bernard 1986: A Course in English Language and Literature. London:
Edward Arnold.
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The two basic periods upon which our system of time-keeping depends are the year and the day. These are determined by two quite distinct notions. The year depends upon the time the earth takes to travel round the sun in a circular path [. . .] The day depends principally upon the time taken for the earth to rotate around its axis.
Text 5I (Land, The Language of Mathematics7).
3. Pamphlet 1967: Jungle Survival. PAM (AIR) 214. London: Ministry of Defence.
4. Martin, E., Larkin, S. and Bernbaum, L. (eds) 1976: The Penguin Book of the Natural World. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
5. Lowry, J.H. 1970: World Population and Food Supply. London: Edward Arnold.
6. Hughes, Ted 1986: The Iron Man. London: Faber & Faber.
7. Land, Frank 1960: The Language of Mathematics. London: John Murray.
Notes 105