Evaluating lexical cohesion in telephone conversations

Abstract

Ever since the publication of Halliday and Hasan (1976), cohesion analysis has received much attention in several branches of linguistics. Lexical cohesion in particular has been shown to contribute to the coherence of discourse in a number of ways (Ferstl and von Cramon, 2001;Hellman, 1995;Hoey, 1991b;Sanders and Pander Maat, 2006), and specific patterns of lexical cohesion have emerged as relevant for the description of different registers and genres (Louwerse et al., 2004;Taboada, 2004;Tanskanen, 2006;Thompson, 1994). In the present article I challenge existing models of lexical cohesion and offer a revised one which affords particular attention to what I call 'associative cohesion'. I go on to test the adequacy of the proposed framework in a corpus of 15 telephone conversations (20,043 words) extracted from the International Corpus of English-Great Britain. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods the article analyses 3480 ties and demonstrates that telephone conversations are lexically cohesive mostly due to repetitions (52.6%), associative cohesion (24%) and inclusive relations (10.5%), which overwhelmingly occur across the turns (87.6%) and over remote-mediated spans (71.9%). In addition, lexical patterns are shown to collaborate in topic management processes and to be sensitive to genre-specific factors, thereby demonstrating the descriptive potential and applicability of the framework.

Social Interaction in YouTube Text-Based Polylogues: A Study of Coherence

“…While coherence is not a property of texts, these contain “a manifestation of the participants' common making of meaning,” itself a “situated and distributed practice” (Korolija, , p. 429). In the words of Gómez González () “although coherence phenomena may be cognitive in nature, their (re)construction is often based on explicit linguistic signals in the text itself” (p. 600) . Coherence, then, may be generally viewed as ‘connection building’ in and through discourse.…”

Systemic cohesion in social media conversations: Cases on Facebook and Twitter

“…Past researches on cohesion and coherence typically dealt with the concepts of cohesion and coherence (Moe, 1977;Carrell, 1982), the applications of cohesion and coherence in academic writing (Bamberg, 1984;Fitzgerald & Spiegel, 1986;McCulley, 1985;Neuner, 1987;Palmer, 1999;Parsons, 1991; Copyright © 2018, IJAL, e-ISSN: 2502-6747, p-ISSN: 2301-9468 Tierney & Mosenthal,1983;Witte & Faigley, 1981), the relation of cohesion and coherence with readers' understanding on the texts (Klebanov & Shamir, 2006) as well as the measurement of cohesion and coherence (Haswell, 1988;Graesser, McNamara, & Kulikowich, 2011). While all these researchers focused on studying textual materials, some others (Angermeyer, 2002;Gonzales, 2010;Klebanov, Diermeier & Beigman, 2008;Schiffrin, 1985) analyzed cohesion in spoken discourse, such in conversations and speeches.…”

“…Meanwhile, dealing with the types of cohesion, in his article on lexical cohesion in telephone conversations, Gonzales (2010) proposes a new term 'associative cohesion' in addition to the established grammatical and lexical cohesion. Associative cohesion covers associative relations that operate across long or short stretches of discourse (either within or across utterances and turns).…”

Lexical cohesion revisited. A combined corpus and systemic-functional analysis

“…In this chapter I propose a modified approach to lexical cohesion (see also Gómez González, 2010, 2011, 2013. My point of departure is that, in order to obtain a functionally adequate usage-based account of lexical cohesion, a discourse-specific view, rather than a system-oriented perspective, should be adopted assuming that lexical meaning is (con)text-specific (Hoey, 1991;Morris & Hirst, 1991;McCarthy, 1988;Tanskanen, 2006).…”

“…monologic, dialogic, multimodal) and genres (e.g. narratives, academic language, legal texts, fund-raising letters, news reports) (Gutwinski, 1976;Tanskanen, 2006;Carter-Thomas, 2008;Flowerdew & Mahlberg, 2009;Gómez González, 2010, 2011, 2013, as well as across different languages and cultural backgrounds (Taboada, 2004;Yankova, 2006;Kunz, 2015;Steiner, 2015). Lastly, cohesion has also been used as a tool for topic detection and tracking (Stokes, 2004), as a measure of text readability in psycholinguistics and computational linguistics (CohMetrix), as a means of effective communication in (first, foreign, and/or second language) language education, or as a test to evaluate levels of faithfulness to the original text in translation studies (McNamara et al, 2002;Ebrahimpourtaher & Eissaei, 2013;Struthers et al, 2013).…”