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In:Lexical Priming: Applications and advances
Edited by Michael Pace-Sigge and Katie J. Patterson
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 79] 2017
► pp. 3–38

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Cohesion and coherence in a content-specific corpus

 | University of Liverpool
Published online: 14 August 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.79.01hoe
This paper is a tentative and incomplete exploration into whether there are any grounds for believing that the way cohesion is utilised and recognised is the result of priming. As a necessary consequence of the first goal, it is an investigation into the relationship between two ways of looking at lexis in text, the one associated with cohesion, the other associated with corpus linguistics. It is only perhaps because cohesion studies have taken a back seat in 21st century linguistics that there has not been more attention given to the terminological embarrassment that the term ‘collocation’ is currently used in two apparently quite separate ways in the linguistic literature, to mean in corpus linguistics the semi-arbitrary co-occurrence of two or more words and in cohesive studies the relationship between different lexical items in a text that contributes to the creation of coherence in the text. Such an investigation is also an investigation into the compatibility of the methodologies employed in corpus linguistics and cohesive studies, and this is an investigation in which I have a personal investment, since I have at different times been a student of cohesion and a corpus linguist.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The corpus
  • 3.Cohesion studies versus corpus linguistics
  • 4.Types of lexical cohesion used as a way of repeating textual material
  • 5.The significance of cohesive repetition
  • 6.A corpus-linguistic perspective on the cohesion in the ‘Planet X’ text
  • 7.A way forward
  • 8.Collocation and semantic association across texts that creates cohesive chain interaction
  • 9.Content-specific collocations, semantic associations and cohesive chains
  • 10.Intertextual bonding
  • 12.Some brief conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
  • Author query
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