Lexical Cohesion In English Text And Its Implications For Language Teaching

Cohesion, as one of the most important components of a text, contributes much to the coherence of a text and has aroused the interests of many linguists and scholars ever since. In 1976, Halliday and Hasan published their famous work cohesion in English, which made the word cohesion a widely accepted term in text linguistics. Cohesion can be divided into two types: grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion. Grammatical cohesion is achieved through grammars. Lexical cohesion is the only type of cohesion that regularly forms multiple semantic relationships. In this sense, lexical cohesion becomes the dominant mode of creating texture. In other words, the greater part of the study of cohesion is the study of lexis, and the study of cohesion in text is to a considerable degree the study of patterns of lexis in text. At present, studies on lexical cohesion mainly follow cohesive theory guided by Halliday and Hasan, in which lexical cohesion is parallel to the other grammatical cohesive devices. This kind of classification of cohesive ties narrows the scope covered by lexical cohesion and reduces its contributions to textual coherence as a result. In fact, the cohesive ties between lexical items cast great influence on textual coherence. Therefore, the current thesis is mainly adopted the results of Hoey's research (patterns of lexis), together with some Halliday's viewpoints. It will analyze different types of lexical cohesion in English texts as well as their functions. In order to make it more pertinent, all the examples will be taken from College English.The patterns of lexis are obviously quite useful to English teaching. Firstly, it can help students get a better understanding of the characteristics of English lexical cohesion and thus understand better the structure and purpose of the text. Secondly, it can be applied to the teaching of vocabulary, reading, writing, etc. In this thesis, we make great effort to show how to make an abridgement under the guidance of the patterns of lexis. Moreover, researches have been already done in other languages besides English. It is found that patterns of lexis can be figured out in texts of other languages. So this can contribute to the development of machine translations.