cohesion

[Zouhair Maalej]

Dear colleagues,
Sorry for posting in HTML instead of plain text. Here is the post again
in plain text.
Zouhair

Zouhair Maalej wrote:

> 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:
>
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> phenomenon of the Internet has exploded the business world. In 1991,
> roughly a thousand businesses were connected to the Internet. Now,
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>
> 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
>