A Discourse Approach To Lexical Repetition Network

It is generally said that brevity is the soul of wit. People usually advocate ellipsis and avoid repetition, considering lexical repetition to be a kind of negative pragmatic phenomenon. Therefore, one always tries to look out for repetition in one's writing or speaking.However, lexical repetition plays a crucial role in spoken or written language. Reynolds (2001) remarks that any essay written on a single topic is likely to involve some repetition of lexical items or at least synonymous references to a single referent. There may even be repetition of entire phrases or propositions. Writing ability measures are the most important variables for predicting changes in repetition usage. Tannen establishes repetition as a key aspect of discourse but goes on to argue that conventional views of repetition as somehow inefficient or ill-formed are inappropriate. In Ulatowska et al's words, repetition as a phenomenon has received attention for both its ubiquity and variety of structural and functional manifestations. Repetition is ubiquitous in the sense that repetition of elements, broadly speaking, is what constitutes the very systematicity of language. Tannen (1989) notes that there is a sense in which all language is repetition of...