Lexical Cohesion in Discourse Analysis

Lexical Cohesion

Lexical cohesion comes about through the selection of items that are related in some way to those that have gone before (Halliday, 1985: 310). Types of lexical cohesion are repetition, synonymy and collocation. Furthermore, Halliday and Hasan (1976: 288) divide types of lexical cohesion into reiteration (repetition, synonymy or near-synonym, superordinate and general word) and collocation.

a.        Reiteration

Reiteration is a form of lexical cohesion which involves the repetition of lexical item, at one end of the scale.

1)        Repetition

The most direct form of lexical cohesion is repetition of a lexical item; e.g. bear in sentence Algy met a bear. The bear was bulgy (Halliday, 1985: 310). Here the second occurrence of bear harks back to the first.

2)        Synonym or Near – synonym

Synonym is used to mean ‘sameness of meaning’ (Palmer, 1981: 88). Lexical cohesion results from the choice of a lexical item that is in some sense synonymous with a preceding one; for example sound with noise, cavalary with horses in

He was just wondering which road to take when he was started by a noise from behind him. It was the noise of trotting horses . . . He dismounted and led his horse as quickly as he could along the right-hand road. The sound of the cavalarly grew rapidly nearer … (Halliday, 1985: 310).

3)        Superordinate

Superordinate is term for words that refer to the upper class itself (Palmer, 1981: 85). In contrary, term for words that refer to the lower class itself is hyponym. For example:

Henry’s bought himself a new Jaguar. He practically lives in the car (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 278)

Here, car refers back to Jaguar; and the car is a superordinate of Jaguar.

4)        General Word

The general words, which correspond to major classes of lexical items, are very commonly used with cohesive force. They are on the borderline between lexical items and substitutes. Not all general words are used cohesively; in fact, only the nouns are when it has the same referent as whatever it is presupposing, and when it is accompanied by a reference item (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 280-1). For example:

There’s a boy climbing the old elm.

That old thing isn’t very safe (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 280).

Here, the reiteration takes the form of a general word thing.

b.        Collocation

Collocation is lexical cohesion which depends upon their tendency to co-occur in texts (Firth, 1957 in Lyons, 1977: 612). For example:

A little fat man of Bombay

Was smoking one very hot day.

But a bird called a snipe

Flew away with his pipe,

Which vexed the fat man of Bombay (Halliday, 1985: 312)

There is a strong collocational bond between smoke and pipe, which makes the occurrence of pipe in line 4 cohesive.

Palmer assumes that collocation is very largely determined by meaning and it is sometimes fairly idiosyncratic and cannot easily be predicated in terms of the meaning of the associated words (1981: 76). To easier restriction of collocation, he also divides three kinds of collocational restriction. First, some are based wholly on the meaning or the item. Secondly, some are based on range. Thirdly, some restrictions are collocational in the strictest sense (1981: 78).