Lexical cohesion is Cohesion achieved through vocabulary choices: the way words in a text relate to each other semantically to create texture and connectedness. Halliday and Hasan (1976) identified it as one of five cohesive categories, and subsequent research (particularly Hoey, 1991) demonstrated that it is the most common and most powerful type of cohesion in English text.
Repeating or restating a lexical item through various means:
| Device | Example |
|---|---|
| Repetition | The car skidded. The car had been travelling too fast. |
| Synonymy | The car skidded. The vehicle had been travelling too fast. |
| Superordinate (hyponymy) | The Volvo skidded. The car had been travelling too fast. |
| General word | The car skidded. The thing had been travelling too fast. |
Words that habitually co-occur create cohesive ties through association:
The weather was terrible. Rain had been falling all day, and the wind made it impossible to go outside.
Weather, rain, wind, outside: none repeats or substitutes for another, but they belong to the same experiential domain and their co-occurrence creates textual cohesion (see Collocation).
| Relation | Definition | Example pair |
|---|---|---|
| Synonymy | Same or similar meaning | begin / start |
| Antonymy | Opposite meaning | hot / cold |
| Hyponymy | Class membership (specific ⊂ general) | rose / flower |
| Meronymy | Part-whole | wheel / car |
| Repetition | Same word or morphological variant | investigate / investigation |
| Collocation | Habitual co-occurrence | doctor / hospital / patient |
In Patterns of Lexis in Text, Michael Hoey argued that lexical repetition is the primary organising force in non-narrative text. His model identifies bonds (clusters of lexical links between sentence pairs) and nets (patterns of interconnection across the text). Sentences with many bonds are central to the text's argument; sentences with few bonds are marginal. This allows principled summarisation: central sentences form a coherent abridgement.
Hoey later developed Lexical Priming theory (2005), arguing that words are mentally "primed" for their typical collocations, grammatical patterns, and textual positions through repeated exposure.
| Grammatical cohesion | Lexical cohesion |
|---|---|
| Reference (he, this, which) | Repetition, synonymy |
| Substitution (one, do, so) | Superordinates, general words |
| Ellipsis (omission) | Collocation |
| Conjunction (however, therefore) | Antonymy, meronymy |
Grammatical cohesion operates through closed-class items (pronouns, conjunctions); lexical cohesion operates through open-class items (nouns, verbs, adjectives). In most texts, lexical cohesion carries the greater burden.