Essay On Lexical Cohesion

Figure 2.0.2 Lexical Cohesion based on Halliday and Hasan (1967)

Reiteration, as the first category of lexical cohesion, is a phenomenon in which the lexical item refers back to another item that has a connection with a general reference. It is a lexical cohesion which forms a constituent that has been mentioned. Reiteration consists of repetition, hyponymy, synonyms, and antonymy. The purpose of using these aspects of reiteration is to obtain the effect of the intensity of the meaning of language, information events, and beauty of other languages. Haliday and Hasan (1976) says that:

Reiteration is a form of lexical cohesion which involves the repetition of a lexical item, at one end of the scale; the use of a general word to refer back to a lexical item, at the other end of the scale, and a number of things in between the use of a synonym, near-synonym, or superordinate.

For the analysis of lexical cohesion, it is

(64) He had been far from the scene of accident and did not even know there had been one.

Co-hyponymy occurs when two or more lexical items used in a text as subordinate members of a superordinate class (Eggins, 2004). If class/sub-classes relation is between the general item and its specific items, co-hyponymy relation is between two or more specific items. To illustrate co-hyponymy, a simple example is taken from The Story of an Hour (Eggins, 2004).

[2.5] (55) Spring days and summer days and all sorts of days that would be her own.

Meronymy occurs when two lexical items are related as whole to part (or vice versa). Similarly to the hyponymy, the directionality of the relation determines under which category the relations is ranked. To differentiate them, in hyponym, an item is a kind of another item, in meronymy, an item is a part of another item (Eggins, 2004; Emilia, 2014; Halliday and Hasan, 1985). A simple example is taken from The Story of an Hour (Eggins, 2004)