LEXICAL COHESION

Halliday and Hasan

Textual cohesion
According to Halliday and Hasan, textual cohesion is a
semantic concept which refers to meaning relationships
within the text. These relationships define the text as a
text. (Koch, p. 17)
Cohesion is part of a language system. Although it is
regarded as a semantic relationship, it is established
through the lexico-grammatical system.
Since it establishes semantic relationships, cohesion is
related to the semantic resources through which a
sentence is linked to the previous one.

Lexical cohesion
Lexical cohesion is the cohesive effect achieved by
selection of the vocabulary.
General nouns: a class of nouns on the borderline
between grammatical e lexical cohesion, i.e. a borderline
case between a lexical item (member of an open set) and
a grammatical item (member of a closed system). The
term bordeline case refers to the fact that there is no
sharp line between them, which happens exactly because
there is no sharp line between grammar and vocabulary.
General nouns comprise a small set of nouns having
generalized reference within two major classes. (Eg.:
people, person, thing, stuff, etc.)

General nouns
A general noun in cohesive function is almost always
accompanied by na anaphoric THE. When it happens, it
functions like an anaphoric reference item. (E.g.: Marcos
has been working a lot. The poor boy is worn out.)
Some general nouns express a particular attitude on the
part of the speaker (idiot, fool, devil, the stupid thing,
etc.). They are an expression of interpersonal
meaning.
They convey familiarity as opposed to distance. Just a
few general nouns (as the ones in the example above)
have this interpersonal element as part of their meaning.

General nouns
According to Halliday: From a grammatical point of view
the combination of general noun plus specific
determiner, such as the man, the thing, is very similar to
a reference item. There is little difference between it
seems to have made little impression on the man and it
seems to have made very little impression on him: in
both instances interpretation is possible only by
reference to something that has gone before. But it is not
the case that there is no difference at all: the form with
general noun the man, opens up another possibility, that
of introducing na interpersonal element into the meaning,
which is absent in the case of the personal pronoun.
[pp.275, 276]

Reiteration
Reiteration is a form of lexical cohesion which involves
the repetition of a lexical item or the use of a general
word to refer back to a lexical item, as well as a number
of things in between: synonym, near-synonym, or a
superordinate (Eg.: a car is a superordinate of a
Mercedes).
For reiteration to take place, it is not necessary that the
second item repeats the first one.
By the same token, it is not necessary for two lexical
occurences to have the same referent in order for them
to be cohesive.

Superordinates
In English the words animal and dog are related in
such a way that dog refers to the type of animal, and
animal is a general term that includes dog and other
types of animal. The specific term, dog, is called a
hyponym, and the general term, animal, is called a
superordinate.
A superordinate term can have many hyponyms.
For example: vehicle: bus car lorry van

Cohesive patterns
A lexical item coheres with a preceding occurence of the
same item irrespective of the fact that they have the
same referent.
The second occurence may be identical, inclusive,
exclusive, or unrelated. [p. 283]
Therefore, reference is irrelevant for lexical cohesion,
since the cohesive force set up by two occurences of a
lexical item does not happen by virtue of any referential
relation.

Collocations
Collocation is when cohesion is achieved through the
association of lexical items that regularly co-occur.
Collocation results from the possibility of cohesion
between any pair of lexical items which are in some way
associated to each other in the language. There is a very
marked cohesive force deriving from the occurence in
proximity with each other of pairs such as: laugh...joke;
ill...doctor; try...succeed; bee...honey, etc.
Two lexical items having similar patterns of collocation
which tend to appear in similar contexts will generate a
cohesive force if they occur in adjacent sentences.

Collocations
All lexical cohesion that is not covered by what we have
called reiteration will be put under the general heading
of collocation.
In this case, cohesion results from the co-occurence of
lexical items that are in some way typically associated
because they tend to occur in similar environments.
Collocational cohesion poses special difficultty because
it is hard to estimate, differently from grammatical
cohesion, in which reference items, substitutes and
conjunction clearly pressupose some element rather
than themselves.