Lexical Cohesion and Text-As-Percept.

This is a study of lexical cohesion--cohesive relationships among meaning units--perceived in English basic writing texts. Lexical cohesion is here considered to be the interfacing of the reader with the meaning units of the text, and is thus approached as "process." The study argues that we perceive cohesive ties among specific lexical items to be meaningful principally within the context of a greater wholeness of meaning. Several levels of semantic and lexical wholeness are identified within which cohesive specificities are interpreted, including generic semantic categories of "problemness" and "solutionness" in the texts, within which all specific reiterative and collocational ties may be interpreted. The entire text is reinterpreted as a percept--a diagrammatic visualization. Lexical cohesive features are given spatial dimensions. The text-as-percept is a spatial metaphor through which we visually think about lexical and semantic complexities and simultaneities of cohesion. Correspondences between visual structures of the text-as-percept and linguistic features of lexical cohesion are considered non-arbitrary. Lexical redundancy is associated with verticality, lexical contrast with horizontality. The study comes to conclusions concerning linguistic features of reiteration, collocation, lexical item, and the "textual history" of a lexical item. Reiterative and collocational relationships are of two types: textual and prior-textual. Textual cohesive relationships derive from the whole text unit in which they occur, and are interpretable within the generic semantic categories of that text. Prior-textual cohesive relationships occur within independent semantic sub-units whose semantic integrity derives from outside the text. The "lexical item" is considered to be a discoursal, clausal, and phrasal unit, as well as a single-word item. The "textual history" of an item is viewed as its cohesive behavior as a member of a unit in a larger system of lexical patterning in the text. An item's textual history influences its cohesion-forming potential in a subsequent, "smaller" level of lexical patterning in the same text.Ph.D.LinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161284/1/8702789.pd