cohesion

[Zouhair Maalej]

Dear James,

Knowing that you may not have time, I hope you will bear with my editing
your post.

James Cornish wrote:

> 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 think (it remains to be checked on actual data?) that substitution and
ellipsis are not equally distributed in spoken and written discourse
(cf. work done on orality and literacy by Tannen and others). I believe
(I haven't read anything to this effect) that they are more frequent in
speech, which may be the reason why you didn't find a significant
occurrence of them in your students' compositions.

> 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.

I don't think that this is like the chicken-and-egg issue. Lexical
matters include relations (as you rightly mentioned it) such as
co-classification (similarity, contrast, hyponymy) and meronymy (this is
when two lexical items are related as whole to part or part to whole
(e.g. "the legs going up and down beyond the railings."  One important
case of meronymy is synecdoche, which is the substitution of a part for
the whole, or the whole for a part.)). Hyponymy expresses relations of
inclusion between lexical items. "Co-hyponyms can be seen as kinds of
SYNONYMS, since their CONCEPTUAL MEANINGS partly overlap in respect of
their superordinate. If synonymy is symmetrical (a = b), hyponymy is
asymmetrical: ... an oak is a tree, but a tree is not necessarily an
oak. But hyponymy, like synonymy, often functions in discourse as a
means of lexical COHESION by establishing referential EQUIVALENCE to
avoid repetition: Did you see the policeman flag down that old car? I
bet the vehicle wasn't taxed or insured properly" (K. Wales, A
Dictionary of Stylistics, 1989: 223). What is important about lexical
relations is that, they are, in De Saussure's words, paradigmatic, i.e.
selecting one excludes the other. One cannot use a lexical item and its
antonym simultaneously, although one can create a special effect by
using a lexical item and its near-synonym or a lexical item and its
antonym (which immediately takes beyond lexical considerations). A
semantic relation such as cohesion, however, is syntagmatic (i.e. a
text-forming property), and allows for co-occurrence (semantic
stability), pro-forms (linguistic economy), ellipsis (recoverability
from a previous mention [the anaphora issue], which contributes to
economy, linguistic compactness, and difficulty of language processing).

> 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."

As I mentioned in my previous mail, H&H (1976) define a text not as a
structural but as semantic unit. Hasan (1989: 71) defines the texture of
a text as "manifested by certain kinds of semantic relations between its
individual messages." It so happens that it is cohesion, at least
partly, that provides a text with its texture. If you have patience, I
will post a short text for you with features of lexical cohesion
underlined. Of course, other kinds of cohesive devices exist in the
text:

What is IBM's Presence?
Seldom does an opportunity come along that offers such vast riches to
business around the world and completely redefines an industry. The
phenomenon of the Internet has exploded the business world. In 1991,
roughly a thousand businesses were connected to the Internet. Now,
twenty-one thousand businesses are attached! New networks are emerging
at an astounding rate of one every 10 minutes. And there are 37 million
surfers out there today.

Kind regards.

Zouhair Maalej,
University of Tunis I,
Department of English, Manouba,
2010, Tunis, TUNISIA.
Tel/fax: +216 1 362 871

> 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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