Lexical Cohesion

Language Analysis

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.

Types of Lexical Cohesion

Reiteration

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.*

Collocation

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).

Semantic Relations that Create Lexical Cohesion

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

Hoey's Contribution (1991)

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.