Lexical Cohesion In Communication

We have varieties of cohesion in different types of texts and discourse. Certain cohesive links occur more typically in certain varieties of discourse than others: referential cohesion is a characteristic type of narrative discourse when investigating participant chains (Fox, 1987); ellipsis is typical of dialogical texts (Buitkiené, 2005); conjunction is a favored cohesive link in the genres of academic discourse (Verikait, 2005); finally, lexical cohesion is extremely dominant, for example, in the genres of legal discourse (Yankova, 2006). For instance, Thompson (1994) has worked on the aspects of cohesion in monologues and challenges that both the speaker and listener of the monologue face in that kind of situation. The speaker of a monologue

In his investigation he has shown that the major types of lexical cohesion in telephone conversations between intimates are repetitions, associative cohesion and inclusive relations in decreasing order of frequency, and has demonstrated the existence of a number of statistically significant relationships. The first has been shown to hold between the number of ties and the length of texts because the normalized frequencies for ties of associative cohesion tend to increase as the text size increases, whereas this tendency is reversed in the case of repetition and inclusion links. Second, it has been noted that while repetition and associative cohesion seem to be used in different contexts, synonyms, inclusives and opposites tend to co-occur in the same environments. And third, a highly significant relationship has been found between the type of link, that is, immediate, remote, immediate-mediated and remote-mediated, and its realization across or within turns, the most recurrent type being the remote-mediated one constructed across

A common stereotype is that women talk more than men; perhaps you have heard people say things like: ‘women never stop talking’. Women’s talk is often described in terms seldom used about men’s talk: gossip, chatter, nag, and natter are all terms used to refer predominantly to women’s conversations. They all imply that women’s talk is plentiful but rather pointless. There has been a considerable amount of research in this area; the majority of research has been conducted in English speaking countries such as the USA, the UK and New Zealand, in a variety of ethnic and social groups. The research findings have been that there are quite dramatic differences in the ways men and women talk, which are sometimes the opposite of what you might expect. For example, the evidence strongly suggests that men on the whole talk far more than women, in contradiction of the stereotype. This is an important finding because it shows ideology at work. It is so much a part of our ‘common sense’ that women talk more than men, that we tend to assume it’s true despite plentiful evidence around us to the contrary. The fact that we tend to believe that women talk too much, when research shows men on average talk more than women, also indicates how women, and women’s activities, have tended to be undervalued. The differences between women’s and men’s use of language are remarkably many and varied.