cohesion

[Zouhair Maalej]

Dear James,

There is a methodological objection to considering cohesion as conceived by
H&H in their Cohesion in English (1976) as reducible to lexical operations.
For them, it is _a semantic relation_ (p.8). Arguing, therefore, that
cohesion could be collapsed into types of _lexical cohesion_ amounts to
taking cohesion from the area of semantics into that of morphology. I don't
know which Hoey (1994) you are referring to. The paper I have by Hoey
(1994) is  titled _Signalling in discourse: a functional analysis of a
common discourse pattern in written and spoken English_, published in
Coulthard, Advances in Written Text Analysis. In this paper, there is, as
far as I know, no mention of lexical cohesion, but rather lexis as
contributing to types of signalling in spoken and written discourses. By
the way, Hoey (1991: 7) in his Patterns of Lexis in Text concedes that _
While conjunction, reference, substitution and ellipsis are markers of
textual relation, the various types of lexical reiteration are in the first
place types of lexical relation and only secondarily markers of textual
relation_. I take this to be an invalidation of the claim that cohesion is
lexical, unless Hoey changed his mind in a different piece of writing I am
not aware of. Please note that _textual relation_ in this quote takes us to
the conception of text they offer, which is defined, quite obviously, as _a
SEMANTIC unit_ (p.2).
    As to whether H&H's cohesion programme could exclusively be relied upon
for text analysis, I think those who challenged (Morgan & Sellner, 1980;
Stotsky, 1983; Jordan, 1984) them brought little improvement to the system.
So, I think that their scheme remains better placed as a framework for a
study of cohesion in English (in fact, I am using it for an Arabic-English
comparative stylistics course, and it is working quite well).

I am ready for any suggestion or discussion on this directly to my e-mail
address, if you want. Hope to have been helpful.

Zouhair Maalej

James Cornish wrote:

> I have a question for the Hallidayeans on the list:
>
> Hoey (1992) claims that the types of cohesion written about in Halliday
> and Hasan's _Cohesion in English_ (1972?) can be, for the most part,
> compressed into types of lexical cohesion.  Is this claim valid for the
> purposes of empirical studies of written texts or are the more
> finely-tuned senses of Halliday's system needed?
>
> --
> James Warren Cornish -  Texas A&M University
> English Department/ Discourse Studies
> 213B Blocker Bldg. M/S 4227
> College Station
> TX  77840-4337
> 409-845-3542 ex. 40
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