Cohesion again

[zmaalej]

To Sanna-Kaisa,

I am myself only a Hallidayan by profession and not by training. To go back
to cohesion and whether reference and substitution are to be considered
cases of lexical cohesion as Hoey (1991) initiated it, let me develop a few
points by editing your mail.


>Hello,
>
>My name is Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen; I am a research fellow of the Academy
>of Finland at the Department of English, University of Turku, Finland.
>I'm currently working on my dissertation, which deals with the effect of
>communicative conditions on the use of lexical cohesion in spoken and
>written English (in face-to-face conversation, prepared speech,
>mailing-list language and academic writing, more specifically). My other
>interests include discourse features of computer-mediated communication,
>interactional and collaborative features of monologue, and Early-Modern
>English letter-writing considered from a discourse perspective.
>I joined the list the day before yesterday, and as I was skimming through
>the archive files to get an idea of what had already been discussed on
>the list (and how), I noticed there were a few messages on cohesion. I
>hope you will excuse me for continuing a little on this topic.>
>I think the discussion was initiated by James Cornish's question to the
>Hallidayans on the list. Let me stress that I am not a Hallidayan,
>although a lot of what I do has been greatly influenced by him and also
>by some other systemic functionalists. I feel that at the present stage
>of discourse-oriented language studies, still very much characterised by
>emergent ideas, models and theories as well as highly fluctuating
>terminologies, the best way to find interesting answers may not be to
>follow any one model but to try and combine several approaches, which
>will usually reveal that they have more similarities than differences
>regardless of for instance their possibly very different terminology.
>This is not to say that following one particular model would not yield
>interesting results as well.>
>But back to James's question of whether or not in empirical studies of
>texts the types of cohesion in Halliday & Hasan (1976) can be compressed
>into types of lexical cohesion, as suggested by Hoey (1991). Although
>James's question is primarily practical, theoretical ramifications are
>unavoidable. First I think it should be clarified that Hoey does not
>actually propose that all types of cohesion should be compressed into
>types of lexical cohesion, let alone "reduced", as suggested by Zouhair
>Maalej.

When I wrote "reduced" it was simply a way on my part to use a lexical
cohesive variant equivalent to "compressed," suggested by James Cornish as a
way of inquiring about whether what Hoey was doing was a reworking and/or
improvement on H&H's cohesion proposal (I don't know if James agrees with my
understanding of his post).

Hoey notes that the majority of the types of cohesion in his
>material (and in Halliday and Hasan's example texts and probably in any
>longer text) are instances of lexical cohesion (as in Halliday & Hasan,
>lexical is here opposed to grammatical), and thus the space allotted to
>the treatment of lexical cohesion in H & H does not seem to correspond at
>all to its actual importance in texts. It should, however, be noted that
>H & H (1976, p.287) are themselves aware that lexical cohesion (and
>especially their category of collocation) needs to be further analysed and
>more strictly defined. The objective of Hoey's book is, to put it briefly,
>to try to highlight the importance of lexical cohesion, which he decides
>to do by concentrating on repetition (repetition understood very broadly
>as 'saying something again').>
>However, in classifying the relations which he considers instances of
>lexical cohesion (or repetition), Hoey notes that there are also other
>devices than purely lexical ones serving the same function, i.e.
>repeating something: the pronoun systems and substitutes (one, do and
>so). Although these are grammatical members of closed systems, their
>function is to substitute for lexical items, and this is why Hoey
>includes them in his analysis. The issue of whether or not to treat these
>items in the same way as lexical items is basically very simple:

H&H (1976: 32) classify substitution as "a grammatical relation" and
reference as "a semantic relation." Lexical cohesion, on the other hand, is
"the cohesive effect achieved by the selection of vocabulary" (274).

which is
>considered more important, their difference in form or their similarity
>in function?>

Now, there is no quarrel about "difference in form." Substitutes and
referents will show a net difference in form vis-a-vis their antecedents and
anaphors or cataphors respectively while lexical cohesion MAY show
difference in form.  However, as a criterion "similarity in function" is
questionable in relation to reference. The argument is that a referent and
its anaphor or cataphor MAY have different functions. I would illustrate
this from H&H (67):
"'Give your evidence,' said the King; 'and don't be nervous, or I'll have
you executed on the spot.' This did not seem to encourage the witness at
all."

>It is probably evident by now that pronouns and substitution items are
>included in my own analyses as well. -- I must add, however, that my
>model of analysis differs from Hoey's in two respects. First, even more
>than Hoey does in his analysis, I avoid using general lexical semantic
>terms for lexical relations, and follow McCarthy (1988) by adopting a
>discourse-specific approach. In other words, I do not start from
>ready-made lexical semantic classifications, but from a text, and then
>try to establish which items are related in that particular text.
>However, although a discourse-specific and a lexical semantic approach
>are distinct, they are not irreconcilable; I use non-lexical-semantic
>terms, for instance the term equivalence instead of synonymy, to draw
>attention to the fact that the justification for a lexical relation should
>be sought from the text in which the related items occur, not from a
>decontextualised classification. In most cases a semanticist would no
>doubt agree with me on the validity of the relations, but not necessarily
>in all of them. Secondly, my analysis includes collocation relations
>(collocation as defined by Halliday & Hasan); I have further defined the
>category on the basis of the work by e.g. Jordan (1984) and Martin (1992).
>-- Recognising pronoun repetition and pronouns substituting for lexical
>items naturally means that the number of repetition relations per text is
>higher than it would be without them, and the cohesive picture therefore
>also more accurate, I think. As to the importance of the actual
>substitution items (50 pages in Halliday & Hasan; lexical cohesion is
>covered in 20 pages...), I could note here that in my material they do
>not seem to be very frequent; it could perhaps be said that they are
>locally  important in the texts, but not globally. They are more frequent
>(or less infrequent) in face-to-face conversations than in my other
>texts, and very rare indeed in academic writing. Prepared speech and
>mailing-list language are very similar as regards the number of
>substitution items and would be situated in between conversations and
>academic writing on this "dimension". Following e.g. Biber, I do not
>think there can be a simple dichotomy between spoken and written language;

By suggesting to James Cornish to look for an explanation of the
insignificant statistical occurrence of substitution in his corpus, which if
I remember is predominantly written (please correct me if I am wrong) by
reference to orality/literacy features, I did not want to imply the notion
of dichotomy. I teach my students a continuum where orality and literacy
occupy the two poles of the continuum, and where texts simply show
tendencies towards either poles.

>what I try to show in my dissertation is that the use of cohesion varies
>according to the demands of the communicative conditions in which the
>texts have been produced and processed.
>
>I'm afraid this message is getting rather lengthy, so I'd better sign off
>now before I truly get carried away. Needless to say, I would be more
>than willing to discuss cohesion and coherence in more detail (publicly
>or privately), and I'm looking forward to interesting discussions on
>other topics as well.
>
>I list below two papers by Hoey which I think have not been mentioned; the
>first one is a 'patterns of lexis' analysis on narrative texts, which also
>introduces one further repetition category, namely closed set; the second
>one discusses intertextual aspects of lexical cohesion.
>
>Hoey, M. 1994. "Patterns of lexis in narrative: a preliminary study", in
>Tanskanen, S-K. & B. Warvik (eds). 1994. Topics and Comments: Papers from
>the Discourse Project. (Anglicana Turkuensia, 13). Turku: University of
>Turku. 1-40.
>
>Hoey, M. 1995. "The lexical nature of intertextuality: a preliminary
>study", in Warvik, B., S-K. Tanskanen & R. Hiltunen (eds). 1995.
>Organization in Discourse: Proceedings from the Turku Conference.
>(Anglicana Turkuensia, 14). Turku: University of Turku. 73-94.

I would very much appreciate it if you could possibly send me a copy of
these papers by Hoey, since I have only access to material published in
England, US, or France.
I must stop here for the moment. Waiting for your feedback.
>
>Anglicana Turkuensia web page:
>http://www.utu.fi/hum/engfil/publicat.html
>
>
>* * *
>Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen
>Department of English
>University of Turku
>20014 Turku, Finland
>sakata at utu.fi
>


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