cohesion

[James Cornish]

Zouhair Maalej

Thank you for your reply to my "cohesion" question.  I confess to making
loose references "off the top of my head" without checking the exact
dates of publication, therefore possibly misleading.  I was referring to
Hoey's Patterns of Lexis in Texts  (1991) wherein he goes to great pains
to lead to the argument that "Despite the fact that lexical cohesion is
covered in Halliday and Hasan's book in less than twenty pages (compared
with over fifty for substitution), it is the single most imprtant form
of cohesive tie, even in terms of Halliday and hasan's own sample
analyses at the end of the 1976 book."  I took this claim by Hoey as a
minor challange and looked at the database of student writing I've been
building for a few years now and found that the actual occurances of
ellipsis and what Halliday and Hasan label as "substitution" simply
don't happen to any significant degree.  I realize that the database is
sckewed, but that rather informal examination motivated me to begin to
actually sit at the computer screen and use Hoey's methodology (the flow
charts in the Patterns book) to examine a few essays in depth.

> 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).

Yes, but I would argue that "text and textual relations" are semantic
units very different than a word.  I have not read the article in
Advances in Written Discouse (again thank you for the references) so am
on shakey ground here.  But, at least in the Patterns book and the early
On the Surface of Discourse, Hoey is trying to leave the metaphor of
seeing internal text relationships like one sees internal sentence
relationships and using the same labelling system--to me an enourmously
attractive departure.

I take it that  you are defining "lexial" as merely vocabulary items and
"sematic" as the meaning attached to a given stretch of language.  Then
we are approaching the tautological problem facing any discussion of
this type:  where do the lexical items leave off and the meanings begin,
or just as validly, vice versa.

At this stage in my investigations into the text-forming quality of
lexical cohesion, I really center on patterns of vocabulary items, their
synonyms, antonyms, hypo- and hypernyms (is that a word?) without, at
least at this early stage, much concern for the ultimate MEANING arising
for the whole of each of these short texts.  But I have to respectfully
disagree that lexical cohesion is not a text-forming quality;  it is
simply one of the colors in the stream of the process called "text."

I will leave this uncapped for now because of the lack of time.  But
thank you so much for your response and references, and I look forward
to more of both.

--
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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