cohesion

[Zouhair Maalej]

To all,

Sorry, I didn't know about HTML and text. This is the post again in
plain text.
Zouhair

Zouhair Maalej wrote:

> 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
>