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Cohesion and coherence
Linguists use two notions of cohesion and coherence to refer to the connectedness of spoken as well as written discourse or text. Connecting relations also hold among elements of structure within grammatical units such as word, phrase, clause or sentence. But their intra-sentential relations are different in kind because they are determined by phonological and grammatical rules and described, inter alia , as syntactic-semantic relations of valency, dependency, constituency, modification. Cohesion, operating intersententially, and coherence are key notions in text and discourse analysis, as well as in pragmatics because they also relate to the complex interrelationship between form, meaning and use of linguistic expressions in specific contexts.
Cohesion
Cohesion is the complex of meaning relations that exist within the text, and that define it as text. → without cohesion, it can’t be defined as a text. We affirm this because a text which is not coherent can’t be understandable even if we know the meaning of every single component of the sentence. In a text there’s a structure cohesion which leads to semantical cohesion. It is not only about the structure , but also about the semantic. And it is not only about grammar , but also about lexical. Cohesion manifests itself in linguistic means that appear at the surface level of language. It occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another. The one presupposes the other, in the sense that it cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it→ this leads to a relation of cohesion. We can also identify five kinds of cohesive ties between utterances
- Reference→ situational or exophoric, resting on means that refer to the situation at hand, and as textual or endophoric reference, resting on anaphora or cataphora that refer to participant roles (→ Doris likes him very much ), to proximity (→ reference as in Joe won’t get tenure. This is what I can’t understand) or to similarity (→ comparative references as in He always eats meat balls with his fingers. I detest such manners )
- Substitution→ involves noun phrases, verb phrases and clauses
- Ellipsis→ “substitution by zero”, it involves noun phrases, verb phrases and clauses
- Conjunction→ can be additive (expressed by and , or , furthermore …), adversative ( but , however …), casual ( so , therefore …), temporal ( then , next , finally …)
- Lexical cohesion→ it rests on “identity of reference” between two items, is realized by forms or reiteration such as word-for-word repetitions, synonyms… All means can be categorized into three types because cohesion stretches three ways: reference to what has been said, to what will be said and to what could have been said instead. This three-way distinction corresponds to Roman Jakobson’s two modes of arrangement of verbal means, selection (paradigmatic choice) and combination (syntagmatic relatedness), to which we can ass the two vectors of retrospection and prospection. Retrospective cohesive means are proforms, substitutions, synonyms, hyponyms, word-for-word repetitions, general words or labels and second pair parts od adjacency pairs → they are based on similarity of form, structure, content and function and can therefore be labelled “forms of repetition” The three essential properties of repetition are quality (→ a scale which represents a continuum of fixity in contrast with looseness of form and indicates the degree of formal and semantic correspondence between the parallel items involved, quantity (→ length of the repeating item and is likewise best represented on a scale with a single word at one end and a string of utterances at the other) and distribution (→ distance between the repeated and the repeating item, which can be anywhere between closely adjacent and considerably removed).
Coherence
Cohesion and coherence are not synonymous, but they work together to provide unity and continuity to the text. → Cohesion can be measured in a text, it’s more objective, while coherence may be subjective. Coherence is a cognitive category that depends on the language user’s interpretation and is not an invariant property of a piece of discourse or a text. Grammar words have a closed set→ can accommodate a limited number of elements. Ex. pronouns→ the word I doesn’t always define the same person, but it is used to replace a word we don’t want to repeat Lexical words include words, nouns… → they have meanings related to concepts and notions, they belong to open sets (potentially infinite) Cohesion involves connections within the sentence ( intra sentential ) and among different clauses ( inter sentential ) Synonyms = words with the same meaning While cohesion is not a necessary condition of coherence, studies have shown that discourse and text tend to be cohesive to a greater or lesser extent, depending on genre. → In this text we can see the sequence of events is extremely simple. The events are in chronological order → there’s cohesion. → We can’t define this a text because there’s no cohesion. We can affirm this because the pronouns don’t let us understand who we are talking about. So, we can affirm that a text is a unit of language in use. It is not a grammatical unit and it’s not defined by its size. A text is not something like a sentence but bigger, it is something that differs from a sentence in kind. A text is best regarded as a semantic unit (→ a unit not to form but of meaning). Therefore, it is related to a clause or sentence by realization (→ the coding of one symbolic system in another). A text doesn’t consist of sentences, it is realized by sentences. A text is also what people produce when they are speaking or writing, so the listener/reader interpret it. The term text refers to any instance of language that makes sense to someone who knows the language, so it can be described as language functioning in the context.
- Paradigmatic and syntagmatic meaning
- Sentence and clause
- Register
- Genre
- Style → these are all the tools we need in order to analyse a text
Now that it can be demonstrated by corpus evidence that a large proportion of the word occurrence is the result of co-selection every time that this can be demonstrated there is one less item of meaning to be allocated to the grammar. → If you have two words that are selected in the same choice, then they cannot be independently selected
John Sinclair→ an outstanding discourse analyst, lexicographer and corpus linguist
In 1991 he published his masterwork Corpus, Concordance, Collocation , which remains to date a reference book for students and researchers in corpus linguistics (the branch of linguistics that studies language through corpora – very large including real texts that can be “queried” in various ways, using specific software) In Trust the text (2004), another masterwork, he proposed an innovative way of describing lexical items, considering both their grammatical and their semantic patterns.
The axes of language patterning
When we are working bottom-up with language (taking the text as our starting point and analysing it in order to reflect on the meanings it conveys and the context it is embedded in), we are interested in considering the text as it is (syntagm – arrangement), also in the light of other possible choices that were not made. Sinclair affirms that we can’t observe the two axes at the same time but needs to stay the same in order to understand the other. It is important to notice that the theoretical development of grammars in recent years has moved across this divide. Then, Sinclair refers to a somewhat traditional method of analysis in which the sentence is first divided into a series of functional ‘slots’ (→ holes, gaps, blanks), to be ‘filled’ by grammatical and lexical words from the dictionary. Under this approach, the horizontal ( syntagmatic axis ) corresponds to grammar (i.e. syntax) and the vertical axis corresponds to lexis. As Sinclair notes immediately afterwards, this way of analysing language is not espoused by all schools of thought in linguistics (e.g. Systemic Functional linguists disagree with it). Sinclair explains also that syntagmatic patterns (→ how words combine to form sequences) are not attributed meaning in those approaches that focus more on the ‘fillers’, i.e. on the words that can be used to fill in a given slot (“paradigm grammar” or “dictionary type of lexis”, lexis described as in traditional dictionary entries, providing definitions without explaining how words interact). The syntagmatic patterns of grammar are simply declared (e.g. ‘This is an SVO sentence’). Lexis has its own syntagmatic patterns, but these usually become evident only in the case of idiomatic expressions: for instance, in an idiomatic expression like ‘break new ground’, it is the sequence of three words taken together (instead of the individual words) that makes meaning. Traditionally, syntagmatic patterns have never been considered ‘meaningful’; meaning was held to reside elsewhere:
- in the grammatical choice (paradigmatic axis) e.g. choosing an active as opposed to a passive verb, with consequences on the way the Agent is expressed, ‘Mary wrote a letter’ as opposed to ‘A letter was written by Mary’
- in the lexical choice (paradigmatic axis par excellence) e.g. choosing a verb instead of another, ‘Mary wrote a letter’ as opposed to ‘Mary drafted a letter’. Sinclair was a pioneer in corpus linguistics: here, he is arguing that corpus linguistics is a framework in which meaning must also be attributed to the syntagmatic patterns. It is no longer possible to consider the two axes (paradigmatic and syntagmatic) separately (as he states on pp. 168-9). Words are typically chosen in Subject – Verb – Object sentence S V O (Syntagm – slots) Mary wrote a letter (Paradigm – fillers)
‘bundles’ rather than as single units: in speaking/writing, our future choices will be partly determined by the choices we have already made (syntagm: arrangement). At the same time, the syntagmatic patterns play a role in our interpretation of the choices made on the paradigmatic axis. In the section Meanings from nowhere Sinclair criticises the “information-theoretic model of paradigm grammar”, which basically puts too much emphasis on individual choices, their number, and position (→ each and every choice is somewhat independent and conveys a specific bit of information). He uses the example of the English sentence out of the corner of my eye e to illustrate what he means by ‘co-selection’ and also to clarify the contribution corpus linguistics can make to the analysis of language. In the expression ‘out of the corner of my eye’, there are seven words, but these are chosen simultaneously and, together, they form one single unit of meaning (= seeing something by accident, while looking in another direction). We cannot say that each of them is a single choice, contributing one specific piece of information: it is the whole sequence that makes meaning. At the same time, choices are pre-determined for us once we decide to use this expression: as Sinclair notes, there are “one or two variants of individual words” (this is where the corpus comes into play: to give us evidence), but the rest is fixed. This is one of those cases in which meaning can be attributed to both axes: the syntagmatic (how the words are arranged into a fixed, meaningful expression) and the paradigmatic. In the last section Cross-border categories , Sinclair makes a final claim concerning the “cross-border” relationship between lexis and grammar. Recall what he stated at the beginning. The traditional divide between lexis and grammar, just like the one between syntagm and paradigm, needs to be problematised and overcome. Grammatical categories can be lexicalized, just like syntagmatic patterns can be said to carry meaning. To illustrate this point, Sinclair talks about the “cross-border” category of negative/ negation, which is in- between lexis and grammar. Grammatical negatives in English include “no” and “not”. There are also semi- negatives like “hardly”, which are not ‘fully’ grammatical. Finally, negation can also be lexicalized: a verb like “refuse” has an inherently negative meaning, but it is used in positive structures, grammatically speaking (‘he refused to go’). This is the direction of future research Sinclair advocates (as he makes clear in the final paragraph), also one that is supported by new insights into the functioning of language coming from corpus linguistics.
the world. This text also addresses non-expert readers, but it still needs to resort to specialised terminology. With reference to this, the adjective «large» in «large language models» is an interesting example of an Epithet that is starting to behave like a Classifier, within what is becoming a fixed expression: e.g., the comparative form «larger language models» is acceptable, but not common.
Sentences vs. clauses
Sentences “exist in order to ‘make sense’. They create it, by bringing words together into patterns. All the pieces and processes of sentence construction – clauses, phrases, nouns, articles, tenses ... – are there to enable us to express and understand meanings. Some of these meanings are quite broad – such as who did what to whom (the ‘subject-verb-object’ construction); others are quite subtle, such as the distinction between ‘some’ and ‘any’ or between ‘which’ and ‘that’. But the only reason we have such differences is to enable us to express contrasts of meaning. And grammar is the study of all the contrasts of meaning that it is possible to make within sentences.” Crystal, D. (2006), The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 97. A sentence is the largest unit of language that it is the business of grammar to describe. In writing, sentences are marked by beginning with a capital letter and ending with a full sot, question mark or exclamation mark. A clause is a major unit of grammar, defined formally by the elements it may contain subject, verb phrase, object, complement and adverbial. All five elements of the clause are illustrated in: The clause is a grammatical unit that is centred around a verb group expressing a ‘Process’ (event, action, activity, ‘going on’). Examples from the text on AI chatbots:
- The study was published in Nature on 25 September. → One independent clause, one sentence.
- The team then asked people to rank the answers as correct, incorrect or avoidant. → Two clauses, one independent, one dependent (hypotactic relation), forming one sentence.
- They are answering almost everything these days. And that means more correct, but also more incorrect” answers → Two independent clauses (paratactic conjunction “and”). They are logically and semantically related, but they are arranged as two different sentences in the text. A sentence consists of one or more clauses. A clause consists of one or more phrases. A phrase consists of one or more words. A word consists of one or more morphemes. Non-finite clauses are centred around a non-finite verb (‘–ing’ or ‘to’ form). Non-finite clauses of this kind are always dependent. → We went around the table introducing ourselves. → He was really excited to tell me about his trip. Some grammar theories (e.g. functional) consider the imperative to be a non-finite verb mood. Be as it may, in English, imperatives are the only kind of clause that can normally include only one group, the verbal one. This is because English is not a pro-drop language (it can’t drop the noun group that plays role of agent, or doer of the Process, in a clause, except in the imperative verb mood).
S A V O C
We always found the teachers very helpful
The clause is the grammatical realisation, or “central processing unit” of text. It can be analysed as:
- representation , i.e. experiential and logical meanings expressed respectively in terms of Processes, Participants and Circumstances in the individual clause, and in terms of dependency and logico- semantic relations among different clauses;
- exchange , i.e. interpersonal meanings expressed by interactive and transactive meaning in the clause (e.g. mood, modality, evaluative language);
- message , i.e. textual meanings, including all features of the clause that contribute to creating cohesion when the clause is set within the text.
Interest in register analysis began in the early 20th century , with linguists like Boas , Sapir , and Malinowski examining how language varies across social contexts. In the 1950s and 60s , studies by Ferguson , Gumperz , and Hymes explored how purpose and context shape language. Recent research has expanded to include synchronic and diachronic studies of registers. Register studies often focus on linguistic features across different registers using quantitative methods, with a common comparison of spoken vs. written registers. Many studies adopt the Multi-Dimensional approach, analysing parameters like formality and speech attention. Diachronic studies explore how registers change over time, shedding light on language standardization and adaptation. Most research focuses on Indo- European languages, especially English, with fewer studies on non-western languages. Computational linguistics also explores sublanguages , which are specialized registers used in fields like science and technology, offering insights into cross-linguistic similarities in technical texts. Many studies on register variation focus on specific registers or situational parameters, but the Multi- Dimensional (MD) approach addresses this gap by analysing a wide range of registers based on multiple linguistic features. This approach has been used to examine register variation in both English and non-western languages, providing a comprehensive view of linguistic differences and changes over time. The present study compares register variation across four languages (→ English, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Korean, and Somali) highlighting potential universal patterns in register variation across different cultures and languages. In register you have a linguistic component (lexical, grammar, phonology…) but there are also context factors which can change the use of the language and the semantics. Registers are different ways to say different things in different contexts. There are two elements that defines the register of a text:
- situational features (which define the situation)
- the choice of the linguistic forms → they are useful to make what we’re says more understandable for who’s “receiving”
- functions → why we are talking/writing
- conventions → lexical choices → we can say that registers are a guideline which allows us to maintain the same way of writing, but actually we can do what we prefer A genre comprises a class of communicative events , the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style. Swales, J. (1990), Genre Analysis. English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 58. A genre is a particular way by which consciousness models experience. In one sense, Bakhtin ’s use of the term genre broadly corresponds to what we would term artistic genres. Moreover, Bakhtin’s examples of ‘genre’ suggest that for him the term was reasonably fluid. He talks of
- serious genres like epic and tragedy
- seriocomical genres like Menippean satire and the Socratic dialogue
- inserted genres such as letters and found manuscripts. Bakhtin also draws a basic distinction between pure genres and carnivalized genres. Among the various genres, a special place is reserved for the novel, since it is the genre which most forcefully resists canonization. Indeed, the other genres can themselves be ‘novelized’, a process by which they acquire ‘novelness’.
Roberts, G. (1994). “Glossary”. In Morris, P. (ed). The Bakhtin Reader. Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov. London: Arnold, pp. 245-252. Speech genres should include short rejoinders of daily dialogue (and these are extremely varied depending on the subject matter, situation, and participants), everyday narration, writing (in all its various forms), the brief standard military command, the elaborate and detailed order, the fairly variegated repertoire of business documents (for the most part standard), and the diverse world of commentary (in the broad sense of the word: social, political). And we must also include here the diverse forms of scientific statements and all literary genres (from the proverb to the multivolume novel). Bakhtin, M. (1986), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, p. 60-61. We use the terms register , genre , and style to refer to three different perspectives on text varieties. The register perspective combines an analysis of linguistic characteristics that are common in a text variety with analysis of the situation of use of the variety. In contrast, the genre perspective focuses on the conventional structures used to construct a complete text within the variety (→ the conventional way in which a letter begins and ends). The style perspective is similar to the register perspective in its linguistic focus, analysing the use of linguistic features that are common in texts. But the key difference from the register perspective is that style features reflect aesthetic preferences , associated with particular authors or historical periods. Biber, D. & Conrad, S. (2009), Register, Genre and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 2. There are no clear-cut boundaries between style in linguistics and style in literature. Modern stylistics is considered to be interdisciplinary, or even ‘indisciplinary’, as it has borrowed both its objects and theoretical tools from many different fields in the humanities and social sciences. Sorlin, S. (2014), “The ‘Indisciplinarity’ of Stylistics”. Topics in Linguistics 14(1), pp. 9-15.
Three register problem
Email message Whatsapp conversation Facebook posting
In between exophoric and endophoric we can find logophoric. Logophoric pronouns are pronouns used to refer to the person whose words, thoughts, or emotions are being represented. Some languages have morphologically distinct logophoric pronouns. Although it isn’t grammaticalized in English (→ there isn’t a set of logophoric pronouns or other function words in this language, as is the case with some African languages), logophoricity may still appear in the form of personal pronouns that refer specifically to the perspective of someone whose speech or thoughts are being reported. In other words, they are not truly anaphoric/cataphoric. Homophoric reference includes all culture - specific elements of the text, including elements that require a shared background knowledge to be interpreted. Culture has many definitions, and it can’t be equated with either nation or language. Culture is learned, it is associated with groups of people and its content includes a wide range of phenomena including norms, values, shared meanings, and patterned ways of behaving. The culture as defined in anthropology usually refers to societies defined in national or ethnic terms; however, the concept of culture has been recently used for describing knowledge and behavior of other groups like in the concepts of corporate culture or organizational culture. Definitions agree on the fact that culture consists of something that is shared and/or learned by a group of people, but the content of the culture varies in different definitions. Homophoric references are non-deictic exophoric references that relate to shared background knowledge, often in terms of culture-specific elements. Some communicate much more than is literally said. Ex. final lines of the AI text: for companies trying to sell all-purpose chatbots, ‘that’ (→ chatbots that say ‘I cannot answer this’) is not something you typically want to give to your customers. → This entails that, in a competitive market, these companies prefer to develop less reliable systems that are, nonetheless, more profitable, indicating greed and unscrupulous behaviour
Pronouns vs. proforms
Proforms are defined as “expressions that stand for other language units”. In English, most of these are pronouns. So, in English, we have seen that phoric reference is realized mostly through pronouns, but some other languages don’t even have pronouns or, if they have them, don’t use them for reference in the same way English does (→ Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Chinese, Turkish, Persian, Vietnamese, Swahili ... don’t have gender markers). It is very important to clear up any misconceptions that languages that don’t have grammatical gender might reflect a more gender-inclusive view of the world. These languages have their own ways to reflect both sex and gender distinctions, and there is absolutely no empirical evidence that speakers of genderless languages have fewer or less strong gender prejudices.
Epicene→ means “genderless”
Epicene ≠ common gender. Common gender in English is the use of a neuter gender to refer to an entity whose biological sex is unknown or considered irrelevant in context (→ babies). Epicene pronouns , instead, structurally belong to either of the animate genders, and semantically aim at leaving the gender of the referent unspecified, to allow for a higher degree of fluidity than the black-and-white distinction between “he” and “she” entails. Epicene forms are generalizable to any entity, either animate or inanimate and, besides being gender neutral, they can also be gender diverse.
- Singular “they”
- Symmetric “he or she”; “s/he”
- Replacive symbols, like * and , and ǝ in Italian
- Neologistic pronouns (ze, xe, fae, ey). The APA Manual of Style is a set of guidelines, originally developed in 1929 for academic writing in psychology (APA→ American Psychological Association), now one of the most widespread standards for typesetting and editing research papers, especially in the social sciences. Its main competitors are the MLA (Modern Language Association) and Chicago manuals of style. It recommends using singular they when the gender of the antecedent isn’t known → A person should enjoy their vacation. → Each student submitted their art portfolio to the committee. → Every individual is unique. They are a combination of strengths and weaknesses. The gender of pronouns is so important in contemporary English that the current release of the worldwide-popular computer suite Microsoft 365 allows administrators to set a pronoun feature, whereby all users can identify themselves in their profile card with “he”, “she” or “they”.
Lexical cohesion
Lexical cohesive devices:
- Repetition
- Synonymy and Antonymy
- Hyponymy and Meronymy
- Collocation By vocabulary we mean lexical or content words→ nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. When we talk about lexical cohesion, we mean the use of lexical words in a conversation/text. A special case of repetition is sometimes referred to as lexical scatter. It consists in the repetition of words having the same root , but belonging to different classes due to morphological distinctions → E.g. use (N), using (V), useless (Adj) Lexical cohesion can occur in the form of ‘reiteration’ or ‘collocation’. Reiteration is the repetition of a lexical item or the use of a synonym of some kind in the context of reference. When we talk about reiteration we are including also the occurrence of a related item, which may be anything from a synonym or near synonym of the original to a general word dominating the entire class Collocation covers all types of lexical relations that do not need referential identity and cannot be described as a type of reiteration. Firth describes collocation as the phenomenon surrounding the fact that certain words are more likely to occur in combination with other words in certain contexts. Collocations can be useful in terms of language teaching→ making students aware of low frequency collocates that native speakers have internalised. In addition, collocates can be useful for demonstrating the existence of bias or connotation in words. → the strongest collocate in the British National Corpus (BNC) of the word ‘bystander’ is ‘innocent’, suggesting that even in cases where ‘bystander’ occurs without this collocate, the concept of innocence could still be implied. The concept of cohesion is a semantic one; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text. Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some element in the discourse is dependent on that of another. The one presupposes the other, in the sense that it cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it. When this happens, a relation of cohesion is set up, and the two elements, the presupposing and the presupposed, are thereby at least potentially integrated into a tex Synonymy → similarity of meaning: words that may be used with the same sense in a given context → ‘faith’, ‘belief’, ‘trust’ Antonymy → semantic incompatibility: words that encode binary opposition, A is not (is the opposite of) B → ‘the bread is fresh’ as opposed to ‘the bread is stale’ Hyponymy → type-token relation→ words that refer to specific instances ( hyponyms ) of a more general class or category ( hypernym ), which may or may not be mentioned in the text → ‘paperback’ and ‘hardback’ as kinds of (hyponyms of) ‘book’ (hypernym) → ‘fear’ and ‘joy’ as types of (hyponyms of) ‘emotion’ (hypernym) Meronymy → part-whole relation→ words that refer to specific parts ( meronyms ) of a whole ( holonym ), which may or may not be mentioned in the text → ‘cockpit’ is a part of (a meronym of) an ‘airplane’ (holonym).
General nouns
There are nouns that can be used to refer generically to board categories of entities, places or individuals, most commonly used in spoken language
- Person, people, business, creature
- Thing, stuff, business, matter
- Question, idea, argument
- Place, building (→ refering to any structure), city (→ referring to any urban area), furniture General nouns play an important role in cohesion. They are, by definition, hypernyms : the superordinate, most general members of a lexical set. Therefore, they can establish cohesive patterns with more specific items from the same lexical set found in the text. Sometimes they can also ‘condense’ or ‘encapsulate’ longer stretches of text. → Text The Very Hungry Caterpillar
This process is at the core of the lexical cohesive device known as Lexical scatter , a special form of Repetition. In affixation , an affix is attached to the root to form another word, which may belong to the same grammatical class, or not, e.g. ‘happy’ (Adj, root) > ‘unhappy’ (Adj), ‘happiness’ (N). Affixes are usually bound morphemes → morphemes that cannot stand alone as words. Affixes can be classified according to their position or to their semantic contribution. Considering their position, in English we can identify the following affixes : → prefixes that precede the root→ ‘unhappy’ → suffixes that follow the root→ ‘happiness’ Other languages also make use of other types of affix, including infixes , to be inserted in the middle of a pre- existing form. Considering their semantics , we can identify: → affixes that form words with new lexical meanings, called derivational (→ ‘happiness’ is ‘the state or condition of being happy’) → affixes that form variants of the same word, with new grammatical meanings, called inflectional (→ ‘states’ is the ‘plural form’ of ‘state’) It is the category of derivational affixes that is taken into account in derivation proper. Words formed through the processes discussed in this lesson may contribute to cohesive ties. With specific reference to reiteration: → Derivation plays a key role in Lexical scatter ; → Compounds are important for → Hyponymy (‘machinewash’ = a type of ‘wash’; ‘handbag’ = a type of ‘bag’) → Meronymy (‘rooftop’ = part of a roof; ‘living room’ = part of a house). Note how, in these cases, one element functions as a Classifier. → General nouns are often created through derivation and conversion. They typically function as hypernyms and can condense extended text segments into single lexical units, enhancing cohesion.
Nominalisation
The use of a nominal form to express the meaning of a process (→ an action, event or state of affairs) or an attribute/quality , which would ‘normally’ be expressed as a verb or verb + adjective structure. They can also be expressed through nouns. Transparency and cooperation are crucial to contain the new coronavirus (China Daily, article headline, Jan 22, 2020) → If people (governments, politicians…?) are transparent and cooperate , then we will be able to contain the new coronavirus. Brexit anxiety drags UK economy almost to standstill (The Guardian, article headline, Jan 4,
→ Since people (consumers/ producers/ industries…?) are anxious because of Brexit, the UK economy is almost standing still. Since the verb phrase is the most central and crucial element of a clause, we can say that nominalisations actually replace whole clauses. Derivation is one of the word formation processes Transparent (adj) + - ency (suffix) → quality/state of being something Cooperate (v) + - ation (suffix) → action/result of → derivation by affixation
Conversion and compounding
Stand (v) → stand (n) → conversion Stand (n) + still (adj) → compounding Not all nominalisations are converted or derived forms from pre-existing verbs/adjectives. Some nominalisations have no direct verb/adjective equivalent, but are still close in meaning to processes or attributes/qualities.
ECO side of nominalisation
According to Thompson , nominalisations have three main textual effects.
1. Encapsulation a meaning is brought in as a full clause, and is then encapsulated in a nominalization that serves as the starting point for the next or a later clause → this is linked to the class of ‘general nouns’ as cohesive devices. → There are a lot of tourist buses in London, painted with bright Union Jacks or that serve afternoon teas, that show you the sights; and so, when you do see a traditional-looking bus, you tend to dismiss it without giving it much thought. And such is the extent of this automatic dismissal that […] I even ran straight past one and didn’t notice.
