Language Sciences 33 (2011) 167179

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Language Sciences
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Lexical cohesion in multiparty conversations q

Mara de los ngeles Gmez Gonzlez *
English Department, University of Santiago de Compostela, Avda. Castelao s/n, E-15704 Santiago de Compostela, Spain

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 6 June 2010
Received in revised form 18 July 2010
Accepted 27 July 2010

Keywords:
Lexical cohesion
Repetition
Associative cohesion
Collocation
Lexical ties and lexical chains
Coherence

a b s t r a c t
Ever since the publication of Halliday and Hasans (1976) seminal work on cohesion, many
scholars have sought to explain different aspects of this textual relation in discourse. The
purpose of this paper is twofold: rst, to add to the study of the interaction between lexical
cohesion and coherence (Hellman, 1995; Hoey, 1991b; Sanders and Pander Maat, 2006);
and second, to contribute to the exploration of lexical cohesion as a measure in generic
and register analysis (Louwerse et al., 2004; Taboada, 2004; Tanskanen, 2006; Thompson,
1994).
I present an integrated model of lexical cohesion which challenges existing proposals
affording particular attention to what I call associative cohesion. Using both quantitative
and qualitative methods, the adequacy of this model is tested against a 15,683 wordcorpus of broadcast discussions extracted from the International Corpus of English. The analysis of 11,199 lexical ties reports repetition (59%) as the most frequent lexical cohesion
device, followed by associative cohesion (24%) and inclusive relations (8.2%), which are
mostly produced in remote-mediated ties (81.8%) over speakers turns (90.7%). These are
shown to be sensitive to genre-specic factors and to collaborate in topic management processes, thereby demonstrating the descriptive potential and applicability of the framework.
2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Cohesion expresses the continuity that exists between one part of the text and another (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, p.
299). Previous work in this area has mainly concentrated on grammatical cohesion (reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction) in written English (e.g., Bennet-Kastor, 1986; Coulthard, 1994; Gutwinski, 1976; Parsons, 1991, 1996; Stotsky,
1983), although other languages have been explored as well (e.g., Spanish in Casado Velarde (1997) and Mederos Martn
(1988); English and Japanese in Oshima (1988); Russian in Simmons (1981); English and Hindi in Kachroo (1984)). In this
study I concentrate on lexical cohesion in spoken English on the grounds that speech is the dominant mode of communication and lexical cohesion the most recurrent and therefore most prominent cohesive device used by speakers, as already
noted by Gutwinski (1976), Hoey (1991a), Taboada (2004) and Tanskanen (2006), among others. Specically, the paper
delves into the interaction between lexical cohesion, coherence and genre, which represent distinct, but interlocking
phenomena.
A coherent discourse is taken to be one where the speakers and addressees can establish a connection among the propositions conveyed (relational coherence), between the text and its context (referential coherence) and among the speech acts or
q
This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (HUM2007-62220, FFI2010-19380) and by the Xunta de Galicia (INCITE09
204 155 PR). The author would like to thank Mayte Lorenzo for her cooperation in the analysis of the data, and gratefully acknowledge the comments on
earlier versions of this work by C.S. Butler, J. Lachlan Mackenzie, Maite Taboada and Mike Hannay. Of course any remaining faults are of my own
responsibility.
* Tel.: +34 981 563100x11856, mobile: +34 615 612 412; fax: +34 981 574646.
E-mail address: mdelosangeles.gomez@usc.es

0388-0001/$ - see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2010.07.005

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(sub)moves intended (coherence). In recent decades, the dominant view has come to be that these aspects of discourse
understanding are cognitive processes in which speakers construct a mental representation of the information in the text,
and as a result coherence tends to be viewed as a characteristic of the mental representation of the discourse rather than
of the discourse itself (see Sanders and Pander Maat (2006) for an overview). However, it remains a fact that, although coherence may be cognitive in nature, its (re)construction is often based on explicit linguistic signals in the text itself. This investigation shows that lexical cohesion plays an important supporting role for coherence. Cohesion, however, is neither a
necessary nor sufcient condition for discourse coherence because texts can be coherent without any formal cohesive devices in the same way that they can be cohesive but not coherent, as already pointed out by, e.g., Brown and Yule (1983),
Halliday (1994), Halliday and Hasan (1976), Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), Hellman (1995) and Hoey (1991b).
Besides, the paper suggests that choices of lexical cohesion are determined by genre, that is, the pragmatic knowledge
shared by the members of a discourse community about a conventionalized class of communicative events with common
communicative purposes (Biber, 1995; Eggins and Martin, 1997; Swales, 1990). Previous studies have come to similar conclusions, showing that cohesion varies across written and spoken registers and genres (Louwerse et al., 2004; Taboada, 2004;
Tanskanen, 2006; Thompson, 1994), with attention being paid in particular to the analysis of narratives (Fox, 1987), academic language (Verikait, 2005), legal discourse (Yankova, 2006) and news documents (Stokes, 2004). This investigation focuses on broadcast discussions (BDs), a thus far unexamined type of multiparty conversations which allows me to see if
previous general statements about the nature of lexical cohesion in speech can be corroborated (e.g., Kerbrat-Orecchioni,
2004; Ochs Keenan, 1977; Taboada, 2000, 2004; Tannen, 1985; Tanskanen, 2006; Ventola, 1987). In addition, evidence is
provided that lexical cohesion participates in topic management patterns, turn-taking behaviours, as well as in the organization of the different generic stages and the interpersonal relationships established in these interactions (Downing, 2000;
Gmez Gonzlez, 2001; Lavid, 2007; Stenstrm, 1994).
The ndings are derived from the application of a model that stresses the context-sensitive and collaborative nature of
lexical cohesion (Hoey, 1991b; McCarthy, 1988; Morris and Hirst, 1991; Taboada, 2004; Tanskanen, 2006), and comprises
ve main meaning relations: (i) repetition (Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Halliday, 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004);
(ii) synonymy (Cruse, 2004; Cruse et al., 2002; Lyons, 1977, 1981); (iii) opposition (Cruse, 2004; Cruse et al., 2002); (iv) inclusion (McCarthy, 1988); and (v) what I call associative cohesion alluding to the inferential processes involved in the (re)construction of frames and triggers (Fillmore and Baker, 2001; Hawkins, 1978; Jordan, 1992; Levinson, 2000; Singer, 1994).
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents my model of lexical cohesion after reviewing relevant
previous approaches. Section 3 describes the corpus while Section 4 discusses and exemplies the results, providing evidence for the effectiveness of the developed model. Rounding off the study, Section 5 summarizes the main conclusions
of as well as the implications for a wider theory of lexical cohesion.

2. An integrated approach to lexical cohesion

Lexical cohesion concerns the way in which lexical items (single words or multi-word units such as, e.g., bed and breakfast,
kick the bucket) relate to each other so that textual continuity is created and information is provided about the way lexemes
are organized in the discourse (lexical patterning). Compelling evidence for the central importance of lexical cohesion in discourse has been reported by, e.g., Hoey (1991b) (analysing lexical patterns), Morris and Hirst (1991) and Silber and McCoy
(2002) (offering a computational analysis of lexical chaining), Johnston (1994), Norrick (1987) and Tannen (1987a,b) (focussing on repetition), Stotsky (1983), Stokes (2004) and Yankova (2006) (concentrating on academic, news and legal texts,
respectively), Mahlberg (2006) (applying the methodology of corpus linguistics), and Tanskanen (2006) (examining variation
across four different types of discourse). Most of these references in this far from exhaustive list concentrate on written discourse and are indebted to a greater or lesser degree to the Systemic Functional framework (SFL), as pioneered by Hasan
(1968) and Halliday and Hasan (1976, 1985) and subsequently developed by these and other scholars (e.g., Hasan, 1984;
Halliday, 1994; Martin, 1992, 2001; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004).
Broadly, SFL distinguishes two main categories of lexical cohesion: reiteration and collocation. Reiteration (including repetition (boyboy), (near-)synonymy (clappedapplause), antonymy (wokeasleep), superordinates (birdscars), and general
nouns1 (problem, fact, situation) occurs where lexical items reiterate, or are semantically related to a previous item, either in
an identical or somewhat modied fashion, with or without co-referentiality. By contrast, collocation (strong tea, friends and
neighbour) is dened as the association of lexical items that regularly co-occur (. . .) or that are typically associated with
one another (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, pp. 284286). Importantly, the systemic analyses of these categories base themselves
on the collocational principle, that is, the predictability relations that exist between items of the lexicon that frequently occur
together, in keeping with the system-oriented approach adopted in SFL. Accordingly, two lexical items are said to create a cohesive relation in a text if one predicts the other, and lexicosemantic relations (synonymy, antonymy, etc.) must be sanctioned by
this collocational principle. But the instantial relations that occur in particular texts are prima facie not accounted for.
1
General nouns can be seen as somewhere in between lexical and grammatical cohesion and thus overlap with McCarthy (1991)s discourse-organizing
words, Francis (1989)s anaphoric nouns or Flowerdew (2006)s signalling nouns. It is to be noted, however, that discourse organizing words are neither
restricted to the category of nouns (e.g., effective, unsuccessful as indicators of evaluation) nor need they necessarily have a general meaning (e.g., answer, result,
effect as indicators of a solution/result textual pattern).

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Table 1
Lexical categories analyzed in this study.
Lexical devices
Repetition (R)

Synonymy (S)
Opposition (O)

Inclusion (I)

Types of ties in terms of distance

Exact (ER)
Inexact (IR)
Near-synonymy (NS)
Propositional-synonymy (PS)
Complementaries (CpO)
Antonyms (AO)
Directional opposites (DO)
Generalization (GI)
Specication (SI)

Inectional (IIR)
Derivational (DIR)

Immediate (IM)
Immediate-mediated (IM-MD)
Remote (RM)
Remote-mediated (RM-MD)

Associative cohesion (AC)

This is precisely the point of departure of my analysis. Assuming that lexical meaning is co(n)text-specic (Hoey, 1991b;
Morris and Hirst, 1991; McCarthy, 1988; Tanskanen, 2006), this investigation adopts a discourse-oriented perspective and
focuses on the communicative potential, rather than on the meaning potential (Stubbs et al., 2001) of lexical units as determined by contextual effects driven by for instance intelligence, cognitive coherence and processing relevance. The implication is that it is the co(n)text (including the speakers) that creates and controls the communicative potential of cohesion
between lexical units, whatever their decontextualized relation. Lexical relations between two or more items are thus discussed in the particular co(n)texts in which they occur rather than as instances of abstract and decontextualized meaning
relations, as is suggested in lexical semantics. Hence items that are not synonymous may nevertheless be interpreted as synonyms in a particular context. Likewise, the same lexemes can be related in different ways if seen from different perspectives
and/or in different contexts. This stresses the discourse-specic nature of lexical cohesion and reects the uidity of the proposed model, a necessary feature if we are to explain the inherent exibility of the process of making meaning in discourse.
In addition, in order to form a picture of its collaborative nature, lexical cohesion will be analyzed both within and across
the speakers turns, at both a local and a global discourse level (Downing, 2000; Gmez Gonzlez, 2001; Lavid, 2007; McCarthy, 1988; Taboada, 2004; Tanskanen, 2006). Furthermore, it will be shown how lexical cohesion is created by two communicators in order to develop global topics (e.g., cognitive schemes that compress the topic of a whole text into a single
proposition) as well as local topics (e.g., Subject and Object participants which contribute to building up text level topics locally), resorting to ve different topic management strategies, namely: introducing, reintroducing, changing, shifting (or switching) and drifting (Hobbs, 1990, p. 3; Maynard, 1980, p. 272; Stenstrm, 1994, pp. 151162). Introducing involves the rst
mention of a topic, while topic re-introduction takes place when a given referent is taken up again on the conversational
ground after having been abandoned over a number of textual spans. Changing occurs when a topic is abandoned in favour
of a new one in such a way that the propositional content of the topic changes altogether, with the two topics being independent of each other. By contrast, both topic shift and topic drift are regarded as two different forms of interdependent topic organization. Shifting involves a distinct movement to a related aspect of the current topic framework that is signalled by
explicit devices such as framing expressions, intonation or backchannels. Drifting, on the other hand, represents an almost
imperceptible move to a related aspect of the current topic through the partial variation of previously established topics, or
otherwise as a result of the association of concepts, ideas or events that bear some sort of cognitive relationship.
Let us next consider the categories and types of lexical cohesion recognized in this study, which are presented in Table 1
and described in corresponding sections below.
2.1. Distance ties
A lexical tie or link refers to a single instance of a lexical cohesive relationship between two lexical items (Halliday and
Hasan, 1976; Hoey, 1991b; Morris and Hirst, 1991). By contrast, a cohesive chain is created when an element refers to another element, which in turn refers to another element and so on (Halliday and Hasan, 1976; Hoey, 1991b; Martin, 1992;
Parsons, 1991, 1996; Ventola, 1987).2
In this study, as in SFL, ties are categorized in terms of distance as: (i) immediate, when the presupposed and the cohesive
elements are found in subsequent sentences; (ii) remote, when the distance between the two elements is extensive; and (iii)
mediated, when the presupposed element is found earlier in the discourse, but it has been followed through the relationship
with some other element (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, p. 330). In addition, a further distinction is made between immediatemediated and remote-mediated ties in order to account for the difference existing between cohesive links occurring in
subsequent and non-subsequent but mediated utterances respectively, as illustrated in (1) and (2) below respectively
2
Focussing on repetition strategies, Hoey demonstrates that lexical chains serve as an indication of the centrality (lexically bounded) or marginality
(lexically unbounded) of sentences in texts. Bonded sentences are shown to be coherent and relevant when placed together, whether extracted from the same
or from different texts, which suggests according to Hoey the existence of eld-related shared knowledge that affects the way in which information is stored
and processed (Ferstl and von Cramon, 2001; Vechtomova and Karamuftuoglu, 2008).

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(the relevant examples of lexical cohesion are printed in bold-type; for details of the corpus and the annotation conventions,
cf. Section 3).
(1) BD 18
4: C: (34) [. . .] our position Englands Britains position with the arts is somewhat pathetic <,> (35) Were bottom but one
of the European list (36) And Ireland is the bottom.
(2) BD 22
2: B: (6) You could be on the edge of winning on the edge of losing your deposit on the edge of being relegated from third
to fourth place [. . .] (20) So everybody wins from by-elections.
The relation England (1: 34) Ireland (1: 36) is classied as an immediate-mediated tie because it is established between two
subsequent units that are mediated by European (1: 35); by contrast, the tie winning (2: 6) wins (2: 20) is regarded as an
instance of the remote-mediated type because it links two non-subsequent items that are mediated by the complementary
term losing (2: 6) (cf. Section 2.4).
2.2. Repetition (R)
As in SFL repetition (R) comprises exact (ER) (ladiesladies) and inexact variants (IR), the latter involving inectional (IIR)
(clubclubs) and derivational (DIR) (membermembership) variation, as shown in (3) below:
(3) BD 16
6: C: (18) No (19) I am a member of several clubs and two or three of them particularly Bells my county club dont admit
the ladies (20) Ladies somehow or other they they never seem to uh get together when they are in a number [. . .]
7: B: (29) [. . .] although I gather at Glamorgan its uh sixty-two pounds for a husband and wife membership [. . .].

2.3. Synonymy (S)

Synonymy is interpreted as a scalar notion that includes two different types of similarity of meaning: near and propositional or attitudinal (Cruse, 2004; Cruse et al., 2002; Lyons, 1977, 1981; Martin, 1992). Absolute synonymy is discarded from
this study on the grounds that words with similar meanings still have different collocates, as observed in recent work on
lexicology (Geeraerts, 2010; Halliday, 2004) (cf. Lyons, 1968, p. 437; Croft, 2000, p. 176). To the category of near-synonymy
(NS) are assigned items that occupy adjacent positions along a scale of degree and those that refer to adverbial or aspectual
features, or to differences of prototype centre. This is the relation between (4: 117) action and (4: 120) operation.
(4) BD 21
29: C: (117) Uh this is an action authorised by the Security Council of the United Nations [. . .] (120) This is essentially a
United Nations operation.
The category of propositional synonymy (PS) covers those synonyms that differ in expressive meaning or stylistic level, or
otherwise convey differences of presupposed eld of discourse, as it occurs in the tie (5: 102) tongue (5: 103) language,
where the former is associated with a biblical register:
(5) BD 20
26: B: (100) Think of the Bible and the Day of Pentecost <,> (101) They went out into the marketplace to speak to them all
(102) Yes many tongues (103) And everybody thought they were speaking their language <,>

2.4. Opposites (O)

This category integrates three main kinds of semantic relations of exclusion: complementaries, antonyms and directionals
(Cruse, 2004; Cruse et al., 2002). Complementaries (CpO) are absolute opposites which occur when the denial of one lexical
item implies that one is committed to the other, as in as in men and ladies below.
(6) BD 16
4: C: (15) The Lords pavilion is an excellent piece of <,> cricket architecture built for men (16) If ladies were admitted then
hot toilets bathrooms showers and certain other rooms would have to be <,> reorganised to meet feminine
requirements.
Antonymy (AO) refers to opposites which are fully gradable and incompatible. A case in point is the (7: 132) difcult (7:
133) easy tie: these adjectives can be used in the comparative and superlative degree and there is a continuum between
being difcult and being easy.

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171

(7) BD 19
36: C: (132) And its very difcult to do (133) [. . .] when youve got the sort of Ruritanian costumes that we we we
adopted its very easy.
Lastly, the category of directionals (DO) contains all pairs which denote opposite directions (reversives), such as (8: 13) go
and (8: 14) come below, as well as those pairs in which one describes a relationship between two objects and the other describes the same relationship when the two objects are reversed (converses), such as recruiting and making redundant in (9).
(8) BD 20
4:
B: (13) and I went to have my fortune told for something to do <,> (14) And the medium came <,>
(9) BD 17
18: C: (49) [. . .] the the squeeze on protability companies are no longer recruiting (50) in fact they are actually making
people redundant.

2.5. Inclusives (I)

In line with McCarthy (1988), hyponymy and meronymy are here merged under the label Inclusives (I), which comprises
two complementary kinds of inclusive relations. Generalization (GI) is the name given to the relations of generalization
(specic
general) established between an item and a more general one. One such case occurs in the chain England ?
Britain ? European ? Ireland in (1) above, renumbered as (10) below, where England, Britain and Ireland are co-specic
(or co-hyponymic) items in relation to European.
(10) BD 18
4: C: (34) [. . .] our position Englands Britains position with the arts is somewhat pathetic <,> (35) Were bottom but one
of the European list (36) And Ireland is the bottom.
In contrast, specication (SI) includes relations of specication (general specic) between an item and a more specic one.
An illustration is provided by the chain dance ? (repetition) ? dance ? (specication) ? steps in (11).
(11) BD 19
24: B: (64) And Trevor had worked out with his choreographer a wonderful dance where they were all whooping and
shouting and screaming [. . .] (67) Uhm so I had the unenviable task of writing a dance to the very complicated
steps that theyd already worked out and [. . .]

2.6. Associative cohesion

SFL collocational cohesion seems to bring together two different, though overlapping notions, namely (lexical) collocation
and what I call associative cohesion. In lexical semantics, lexicography and corpus linguistics collocation is the relationship
a lexical item has with items that appear with greater than random probability in its textual context, typically from four to
six adjacent items (Stubbs et al., 2001; Stokes, 2004), although some scholars speak about long-range collocations which can
go across textual boundaries (Scott and Tribble, 2006). Such a relationship is in principle statistically demonstrable and,
broadly speaking, the pairs or strings of word forms that tend to co-occur in that way have been called collocates (Cruse,
1986) or lexical bundles (Biber et al., 1999), while the psychological processes involved in the selection of such co-occurrence patterns are explored in the theory of lexical priming (Hoey, 2005). By contrast, associative cohesion covers associative relations that operate across long or short stretches of discourse (either within or across utterances and turns). What
follows from this is that while all collocates involve some kind of associative relation not all associates need to be collocates.3
Here, despite the inherent intersubjectivity of the notion, I focus on the category of associative cohesion for two reasons.
One is that it seems to be applicable and operational to my discourse-oriented approach, according to which (associative)
cohesion is located within the system of the world [or the discourse, MLAG], not the system of language (Morris et al.,
2003,p. 160). And the other is, as will become apparent later, that not taking this category on board would have offered
an incomplete picture of lexical cohesion and its interaction with coherence and genre. By associative cohesion I understand
the associative relations that operate across and within utterances and turns through the inferential processes involved in the
(re)construction of frames and triggers (Hawkins, 1978; Jordan, 1992; Levinson, 2000; Singer, 1994). Frame is the general
3
Aware of its heterogeneity, Hasan (1984, p. 195, in Hoey, 1991a, p. 7) suggests avoiding the expression collocational cohesion altogether, but the category
reappears in later SFL works mostly interpreted in the lexicographic sense as an associative strategy relating items back to the nearest related item (Halliday,
1994; Martin, 1992; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). However, it would seem that not all the pairings listed in SFL works are necessarily collocates in the
lexicographic sense, and for that reason the labelling of such pairings as collocations seems to muddle the analysis. Furthermore, despite its many insights,
Martins (1992) reformulation of this category in terms of nuclear and activity relations appears to be quite cumbersome and complex because collocate
relations become intertwined in such a way that practically all the elements in a sentence or utterance turn out to be cohesively related. This undoubtedly
reveals the complexity of lexical relations in language but also complicates the analysis substantially, and makes it more difcult to track with no great increase
in accuracy.

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name assigned to all the conceptual knowledge structures evoked by lexical units that can be inferred from the relevant
stored (specic or shared general) knowledge.4 Discourse understanding can thus be depicted as processing of incoming information to t the relevant frames that we possess. Triggers or prompts, on the other hand, are lexical items that are materialized
on the surface of the text often repeating previous topics and making possible a set of associations which, among other things,
trigger the use of rst-mention denite descriptions based on the speakers and hearers shared knowledge of the generic relationship established between the trigger and its associate(s) (i.e., frames). Illustrations of this category are provided in the club
chain in (12) below: rules ? club ? the Committee ? the members, where the word club prompts the interpretation of its associate terms (rules, Committee and members) triggering the rst-mention denite expression of two of them (the Committee, the
members), as will be further explained in Section 4.2.
(12) BD 16:
1: A: (1) So with no existing rules to specify that it is an all-male club the Committee decided to throw the issue open to
the members.

3. Data and transcription notation

The data consists of seven BDs extracted from the public conversation category of the International Corpus of English-Great
Britain (ICE-GB):
BD
BD
BD
BD
BD
BD
BD

16:
17:
18:
19:
20:
21:
22:

Sport on Four: BBC (radio), 1534 words; three speakers.

Andrew Neil on Sunday: LBC (radio), 769 words; three speakers.
Thames Special: A Question for London; ITV (TV), 2160 words; six speakers.
Richard Baker Compares Notes: BBC4 (radio), 2088 words; three speakers.
Midweek with Libby Purves: BBC4 (radio), 2207 words; ve speakers.
Question Time: BBC1 (TV), 2329 words; ve speakers.
Tea Junction: BBC4 (radio), 2389 words); three speakers.

The sample is restricted to seven BDs, containing a total of 15,683 words with an average of 1925 words per text, in order to
guarantee a signicant, yet manageable textual analysis. The reason for choosing BDs is that, even though intended for a general audience, these talks show the collaborative features of face-to-face conversations with co-present communicators, at the
same time representing a eld where, to my knowledge, no previous research has been conducted in the area of lexical
cohesion.
BDs can be regarded as instances of task-oriented conversations, that is, purposeful and staged dialogues in which the
speakers collaborate to achieve a practical shared goal (Eggins and Martin, 1997; Taboada, 2004). Each lasting about an hour,
in these ve radio and two TV BDs multiparty (polyadic) talk is produced by three to six educated co-participants (from A (the
chairperson) to F) for the purpose of expressing their views about an issue. As a result of their task-oriented character, BDs
follow a three-staged structure, Opening Discussion Closing. The Openings are normally initiated by a chairperson with
brief greetings or vocatives, or otherwise introducing the issue to be discussed with no preamble. The Closings occur at
the end of the BDs, while in the Discussion stage, taking turns usually upon the chairpersons request, the discussants intervene as equals on the subject which may be scaffolded into different (Sub)Topic Proposal stages depending on how many subtopics are introduced over ensuing discourse spans, which is in turn dependent on the speakers acceptance or rejection of a
given topic.
The language used is informal and geared by the chairperson towards stressing the solidarity between the interactants so
that they can express their opinions freely. As a result, there exists a pervasive use of backchannels (yeah, no, uhm, right, ne,
OK, etc. including laughter), abrupt uptakes such as interruptions and overlapping speech, as well as such oor-holding devices as incompletion marks, new starts and lled or tactically placed silent pauses (annotated as <,> if short and <,,> if
long). Pausing has less implications than in dyadic conversations in which when one person stops talking, then the other
person has to pick up the conversation, unless the pause serves some purpose such as to mark disagreement or allow for
repair time.
Lastly, turning to the segmentation of the material, I use the mark-up units of ICE-GB, the utterance (in bracketed
numbers) and the speakers interventions or turns (in bold-type numbers), as they are well suited for our purposes.
Speakers can thus be shown to collaboratively construct lexical ties and chains within and across the utterances and
turns in a here-and-now as an online dynamic process, that is, with the cognitive burden of constantly updating and processing information as the conversation develops, constrained by what has been said and in anticipation of what is to be
said, regardless of whether the same speaker continues or the other one takes over. This will be illustrated in Section 4 in
turn.
4
In more precise terms, frames should be distinguished from other theories of mental models which represent different congurations of background
knowledge. While frames are mainly characterized in terms of memory-modelling or knowledge-organizing units of action, schemas (or schemes) primarily refer
to cognitive, emotional and actional default macro-structures related to objects, events, situations and practices; scripts indicate the participant roles in
prototypical action sequences; and domains represent eld-related background knowledge structures (for a summary see, e.g., Lakoff, 1987).

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Table 2
Ties of lexical cohesion in BDs.
ER

IIR

DIR

R
Subtotal

AC
Subtotal

SI

GI

I
Subtotal

NS

PS

S
Subtotal

CpO

AO

DO

O
Subtotal

Total &
%

WT

556

79

31

666

190

85

19

104

46

48

21

11

34

AT

3993

982

979

5954

2482

662

159

821

522

525

338

36

375

Total &
%

4549

1061

1010

6620

2672

747

178

925

568

573

359

47

409

1042
9.3%
10,157
90.7%
11,199

59%

24%

3.7%

100%

8.2%

5.1%

4. Evaluation and discussion of results

This section describes the incidence and function of the lexical cohesion in ICE-GB BDs. First, some numerical information
is presented, as well as the general conclusions emerging therefrom (Section 4.1). This is followed by a discussion of the ndings providing illustrations of how lexical patterns are collaboratively created in these broadcast interactions (Section 4.2).
4.1. Patterns of lexical cohesion in BDs
A total of 11,199 instances of lexical cohesion devices occurring across (AT) or within (WT) the turns were identied manually and assigned to the fteen (sub)types introduced in Section 2, as shown in Table 2.
The rst fact that clearly emerges from Table 2 is that repetition is the most frequent lexical device in all the seven BDs
with 6620 tokens, 59% of the overall usage the exact type being over twice as common as the other two variants together
(4549 vs. 2071 tokens), while associative cohesion ranks second (2672 hits, 24%), inclusives third (925 ties, 8.2%), synonymy
fourth (573 pairs, 5.1%) and opposites fth (409 tokens, 3.7%). Within the last three categories, specication, near-synonymy
and complementaries are the most recurrent with 747, 568 and 359 tokens representing 78.3%, 99.3% and 87.7% of the usage
in each category, respectively.
These results rstly demonstrate that the amount of lexical cohesion in BDs is highly signicant and question the assumption that lexical cohesion is comparatively less frequent in the spoken than in the written mode because speakers may count
on the aid of prosodic and paralinguistic cohesion (e.g., Tannen, 1985; Ventola, 1987). Secondly, my numbers corroborate the
ndings of previous studies that similarly reported repetition as the most common lexical cohesion strategy in both the spoken (e.g., Taboada, 2000; Tanskanen, 2006, p. 95) and the written modes (Hoey, 1991a, pp. 8199). Thirdly, associative cohesion, ranking second in frequency, reveals itself as an important device that must necessarily be included in any account of
lexical cohesion. Fourthly, the fact that specication ties are more than three four as common as generalization links (747 vs.
178) seems to suggest that de-composition, or the analysis of concepts into constituent elements, the cognitive process involved in specication, is more basic in processing terms than that of composition (synthesis) from constituent elements
of concepts at work in generalization.
Turning to Table 35, another point worth highlighting is that BD 18, a six-party conversation, shows the largest number of
lexical ties (with a normalized frequency (NF) of 1680), while these are only half as common in the two three-party conversations
next in frequency, BD 16 and BD 22 (NFs of 841 and 803). The two ve-party conversations, BD 21 and BD 20, display intermediate values (NFs of 781 and 559), while the other two three-party conversations return the lowest, and almost identical, number of ties (NFs of 458 and 455). More specically, BD 18 has the highest incidence of repetition, associative cohesion and
inclusive relations (NFs of 798, 677, and 180), while BD 16 has the highest amount of synonymy and opposite pairs (NFs of
123 and 214). Finally, BD 17 gives the lowest values for repetition (NF of 106), BD 20 for associative cohesion and inclusives
(NFs of 14 and 7), and BD 22 and BD 18 for synonymy (NF of 7) and opposites, respectively.
These gures seem to contradict the view that number of speakers and number of lexical pairs are variables that stand in
an inverse proportional relation (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2004, p. 6; Tanskanen, 2006, pp. 95, 102, 169). In my corpus, if anything, this relation appears to be a direct proportional one because it is the discussion with more participants that has by
far more cohesive pairs and, at the other extreme, it is the conversations with fewer speakers that similarly have fewer ties.
This tendency is statistically conrmed in the case of R ties by the Pearson correlation coefcient, which reports a signicant
positive correlation between the number of parties involved and the normalised frequency of ties (r = .829, N = 15, p < 0.05),
even if the results for each other type of tie and for the total number of ties show no signicant correlations. One possible
reason for this may be that, unlike what happens in more stereotypical forms of dialogues such as informal conversations, in
all the seven BDs there is a chairperson that moderates the interactions making sure that all the discussants participate in the
issues under debate, and, as a result, all of them actively collaborate to create lexical cohesion across speakers and turns. Or
else it could be that the more speakers want to gain the oor in a discussion, the more repetitive their interventions tend to
become to get their message through to the audience and the other discussants.
5
In Table 3 I use normalized frequencies per 1000 words to be able to compare in a reliable way the relative frequency of lexical cohesion devices across
these BDs with different lengths.

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Md.l.. Gmez Gonzlez / Language Sciences 33 (2011) 167179

Table 3
Ties of lexical cohesion across BD texts (normalized frequencies).
6-party BD 18
2160 w

3-party BD 16
1534 w

3-party BD 22
2389 w

5-party BD 21
2329 w

5-party BD 20
2207 w

3-party BD 17
769 w

3-party BD 19
2088 w

Mean

ER
IIR
DIR

674
51
73

284
95
27

290
88
103

460
65
110

219
146
126

94
6
6

161
56
12

312
72
65

Subtotal
R

798

406

481

635

491

106

229

449

Subtotal
AC

677

29

26

27

14

241

124

163

SI
GI

140
40

53
16

47

34

5
2

29
30

67
18

54
15

Subtotal
I

180

69

47

34

59

85

69

NS
PS

25

123

80

32
2

18

16

43
0.3

Subtotal
S

25

123

80

34

18

16

43

CpO
AO
DO

213

6
1
27

33
0.2
6

Subtotal
O

214

13

34

39

Total

1680

841

803

781

559

458

455

797

Furthermore, in contrast with other studies (Tanskanen, 2006, p. 104), my results in Tables 2 and 4 show that the number
of speakers does not affect the location of pairs across or within the turns. For in all the BDs lexical cohesion is overwhelmingly produced across turns as also reported in Taboada (2000) with 10,157 tokens and 90.7% of all the usage, as opposed to
only 1042 ties (9.3%) located within turn boundaries, a pattern that remains constant across the ve main categories and
three of the four distance types with the exception of the immediate ones (51.7% (WT) vs. 48.3% (AT)).
Strikingly, a chi square test of the subtotals for each of the ve types of lexical cohesion in Table 2 reports a highly signicant relationship between turn type and occurrence within or across turns (v2 = 24.901, df = 4, p < .001). For links of type
R and I are found to occur more frequently within turns than expected under the null hypothesis (i.e., that there is no association between particular types of link and whether they occur within or across turns) while links of type AC occur more
frequently across turns, as opposed to the results for S and O ties which are not far removed from what would be expected
under the null hypothesis. These results seem to suggest as will be illustrated in Section 4.2 that the lexical cohesion
strategies more frequently used by the same speakers within shorter text spans in broadcast discussions are repetition
and inclusion, while AC ties and chains tend to result from a more collaborative process involving different speakers and/
or turns within longer text spans.
Additionally, Table 4 conrms that the remote-mediated variant is the most common type in all the programmes (MF
647) and these are again overwhelmingly produced across turn boundaries (MF 621 (AT) vs. 26 (WT)). Considerably less frequent are remote ties (937 (8.3%)), immediate-mediated pairs (564 (5%)) and immediate links (541 (4.8%)). The frequency of
the last two types of distance ties could indicate a direct proportional relation with turn length; in other words, the longer a

Table 4
Distance ties in BDs.
Distance ties

Text 16
1534 w

Text 17
769 w

Text 18
2160 w

Text 19
2088 w

Text 20
2207 w

Text 21
2329 w

Text 22
2389 w

Total & %

IM
WT-AT
IM-MD
WT-AT
RM
WT-AT
RM-MD
WT-AT

60
2238
38
335
120
2694
1073
161057

39
2113
29
1415
35
728
249
6243

110
6347
220
33187
155
5996
3144
1482996

71
3140
54
648
137
3899
687
26661

63
3528
47
443
132
3597
990
32958

97
5641
33
429
225
63162
1471
631408

101
5249
143
30113
133
4390
1543
1061437

TOTAL
WT-AT

1291
671224

352
48304

3629
3033326

949
101848

1232
1061126

1826
1861640

1920
2311689

541 (4.8%)
280261
564 (5%)
94470
937 (8.3)
271666
9157 (81.8%)
3978760
11,199
104210,157
(9.3%)(90.7%)

Md.l.. Gmez Gonzlez / Language Sciences 33 (2011) 167179

175

turn is, the higher the incidence of immediate and immediate-mediated ties. But in order to conrm this claim further evidence should be provided as regards the lengths of turns (as opposed to text lengths in words). The numbers do prove, however, that there exists yet another signicant relationship between (i) the proportions of IM, RM, IM-MD and RM-MD
distance ties and (ii) which text is being considered (v2 = 350.2, df = 18, p < .001). But given that there is considerable variability across individual texts, as far as the types of distance tie are concerned, it would seem necessary to explore a larger
sample to be able to obtain more conclusive results on this matter.
To close this section, it is worth noting that the average length of the intervening material in ties is not large: about four
utterances in mediated links and two in remote pairs. This is a feature of spoken language. Since it is difcult to keep a large
number of different items in working memory seven, plus or minus two, is the magical number, according to Miller (1956)
speakers avoid placing an excessive burden on each others working memories and mostly resort to remote lexical ties
mediated by repetition, associative cohesion or inclusion to guarantee comprehension, as shall be shown in Section 4.2.
4.2. Lexical cohesion contributes to create coherence
In order to illustrate my ndings as well as the involvement of lexical cohesion in topic management, staging and turntaking in BDs exponents of relational, referential and interactive coherence, respectively let us next consider extract (13),
a representative sample of the Opening Stage of BDs, where (optionally after a greeting) the chairperson introduces the global topic (the club chain) and related local topics (the gender or the voting chains) and presents the discussants (Wilfred
Woollers and Rachels chains):
(13) BD 16:
1: A: (1) So with no existing rules to specify that it is an all-male club the Committee decided to throw the issue
open to the members (2) Itll need a two thirds majority to see it through (3) Now the ex-Glamorgan captain
and former test selector Wilfred Wooller has already voted against it (4) And so we thought wed bring
Wilfred and Rachel together (5) So on to the hustings as polling day at Lords closes in four days time (6) Why
for instance is Rachel so keen to break into this peculiarly male institution
2: B: (7) Its basically that I think perhaps immodestly that Ive become associated with cricket over the years and I
would love to be a member of the greatest cricket club in the world and its its just as simple as that [. . .]
3: A: (10) Wilfred Wooller in Cardiff (11) I mean to admit women as members
4: C: (12) Well hello <unclear-word> (13) I voted against this in my paper last week which will go through to the M
C C [. . .]
In (13) the chairman, Cliff Morgan, uses the word club in the rst move of the interaction to situate the scenario of BD 16
(repetition (13: 7)): it evokes a sports frame, in which the absence of rules (associative cohesion (13: 1)) as to whether or
not it is all-male ((specication (13: 1) vs. all-female or open gender clubs) makes the Managing Committee (associative cohesion (13: 1)) consult the members (associative cohesion (13: 1), repetition (13: 7), (13: 11)) about the issue (generalization
(13: 1)), and triggers the interpretation of captain (associative cohesion) and test selector (associative cohesion) in (13: 3).
The presence of these ve immediate or immediate-mediated collocate terms reinforces the sports frame at the beginning
of Morgans rst intervention, while the presence of the denite article before captain and test selector, as well as the premodifying ex-Glamorgan (specication) is an instruction to the hearers to draw on their stored knowledge in order to work
out the identity of the rst discussant, Wilfred Wooller (specication (13: 3)), and at the same time to situate the discussion in
the world of cricket (specication (13: 7) and repetition (13: 7)), the location being further specied by at Lords (13: 5) (one
of the club premises) and M C C (13: 13) (the name of the club).
In his rst intervention the chairman manages to interrelate four chains: the club chain, the voting chain ((13: 3) voted
against ? (associative cohesion) ? (13: 5) the hustings ? (associative cohesion) ? (13: 5) polling day ? (repetition) ? (13:
13) voted against)), Woollers chain (created through the repetition of Wilfred in (13: 4), (13: 10)), and Rachels chain through
co-specication (13: 4) and repetition (13: 6). As a result, the audience can perceive the discourse as coherent: the voting
issue is presented as breaking news and the oor is prepared to listen to the discussants conicting views on whether
the club should remain a male (repetition (13: 6)) institution (near-synonymy (13: 6)). This marks the end of the Opening
Stage of the discussion and at the same time reactivates the global topic at the end of the moderators rst turn to be developed over the subsequent turns.
In addition, this example serves as an illustration that in BDs topic introduction is achieved collaboratively normally following a two-part turn-taking structure: (i) moderators initiation providing information (informing) or asking for it (eliciting), and (ii) discussants response. Cliff Morgan opens the discussion by informing the audience about the topic at issue in
the rst turn, after which he invites the two guest speakers to gain the oor by doing unconstrained direct topic elicitation
twice (move (13: 6) and turn 3) repeating the same schematic pattern: nominate (addressing the discussant) ^ elicit (framing
the conversation on the local topic). This is followed by Rachels and Wilfreds replies, who summarize in their rst interventions (in Woollers case after a greeting) their positions in favour and against the admission of women in the club, respectively.
The participants elaborate and comment on their views in the middle stages of the discussions until normally the moderator terminates the global topic bringing the conversations to an end in the Closing Stages, as illustrated in the following
extract:

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Md.l.. Gmez Gonzlez / Language Sciences 33 (2011) 167179

(14) BD 16
33: A: (98) Rachel Heyhoe-Flint and Wilfred Wooller (99) The M C C decision on women membership next Wednesday
(100) also a big day for football (101) So another weekends Sport begins (102) and I hope its a very enjoyable one
for you all (103) Goodbye now
In this situation, the chairman, Cliff Morgan, performs topic-closure before the good-bye sequences by repeating: the discussants names (Rachel (13: 4), (13: 6), (14: 98); Wilfred Wooller (13: 3), (13: 4), (13: 10), (14: 98)), as well as the main topic of
the conversation (M C C (13: 13), (14: 99); decided (13: 1) decision (14: 99); women (13: 11), (14: 99); member (13: 1), (13:
7), (13: 11) membership (14: 99)), which were introduced in the Opening stage of the discussion (cf. (13) above).
The gures and examples provided so far lead us to conclude that in BDs repetition reveals itself as the most prominent
topic continuity device, as well as a crucial strategy employed in staging and turn-taking behaviours. Most instances of repetitions are used across the turns, normally through remote-mediated or immediate(-mediated) ties, to develop or to reintroduce the same or a temporarily abandoned topic (Gmez Gonzlez, 2010; Norrick, 1987; Tannen, 1987; Stokes,
2004). This relates to the fact as similarly reported by Norrick (1987, pp. 245246) that in (multiparty) face-to-face conversations each participant either repeats his/her own words verbatim or echoes someone elses words with the intention of
providing an expansion or emphasizing his/her own point of view on what is at issue (e.g., (13) and (14) above), or with the
purpose of showing agreement/conrmation or denial/rejection about an idea that has been grounded in the discourse, as
shown in (15) below:
(15)
58:
59:
60:

BD
C:
B:
C:

20
(198) Why dont I believe you Stella
(199) And then it rolled off (200) Because so many people are sceptic (201) I can tell you why you dont believe me
(202) No Im not a sceptic (203) I just dont believe you

Furthermore, the examples show that when responding to a topic, speakers use repetitions urged by the need to chain to the
main idea (Tracy, 1984) or to a certain part of their interlocutors previous message (Schank, 1977), which conrms Hallidays (1994) and Halliday and Matthiessens (2004) claim that topics play a prominent role in linking the utterance to its
textual environment. Because these tasks place a high burden on working memory in the process of conversation, repetition
is consciously and subconsciously used as a repair and/or feed-back strategy (like clarifying questions or backchannel signals) to ease the processing burden on memory and understanding in the conversation. Repeating the local topic in most
utterances of a conversation lessens the need for large-scale global topic hypothesis forming and at the same time facilitates
micro-level information processing in almost every move of the interaction. Repetition may otherwise result from the constraints of spontaneous oral communication which impede rehearsal and revision, and so this strategy is almost automatically used by one speaker in the same utterance or by participants across the turns to continue with the thread of
conversation in the absence of more elaborate wordings.
It is also the constraints on online communication, as well as their fairly informal register of the discussions that probably
explain the relative scarcity of the other two topic continuity devices, synonyms and opposites, as compared to repetition.
Context (16) exemplies how synonyms and complementaries the most frequent kind of opposites in my corpus are used
in BD 16, where 213 out 214 CpOs cluster around.
(16) BD 16
4: C: (14) Its one of the few havens <,> left for men in my view (15) The Lords pavilion is an excellent piece of <,> cricket
architecture built for men (16). If ladies were admitted then hot toilets bathrooms showers and certain other rooms
would have to be <,> reorganised to meet feminine requirements [. . .]
7: B: [. . .] (26) But as far as my experience in crickets concerned Wilfred I think that any woman who wanted to join
the M C C would honestly and genuinely be doing it for the sake of cricket and their love of the game

Here two discussants, Wilfred Wooller and Rachael Heyhoe, collaborate to create within and across the turns what could be
called the gender chain, men ? (repetition) ? men ? (complementary) ? ladies ? (near-synonymy) ? feminine ? (specication) ? woman, to express their antagonistic views on the topic at issue. It could also be said that the ties ladies feminine
woman are intended as propositional synonymy, with each speaker showing/betraying something of their ideology (referring to women as ladies or feminine in this context is very much what one would expect from a non-politically correct
male speaker who is against admitting them to the club).
By contrast, topic drifts and shifts tend to be realized by associative cohesion and inclusion. Consider, for instance, (17)
below where a topic shift is deployed by inclusive relations:
(17) BD 18
10: E: (66) I think being Prince of Darkness is actually quite an attractive title isnt it <laughter> (67) Probably more
attractive than Minister for the Arts in some ways (68) But let me just deal rst with two of the general points
made (69) I mean rst the politics of this [. . .]

Md.l.. Gmez Gonzlez / Language Sciences 33 (2011) 167179

177

In this extract the speaker, Tim Renton, uses the framing expression But let me just deal rst with to shift attention from his
ironic remarks about the public consideration of his administration as Minister for the Arts (Prince of Darkness) to dwell on
his opinions about what the other discussants have said, two of the general points made (generalization with respect to the
previous interventions): the rst of which (specication with respect to two) refers to the politics of this (specication in relation to general points).
To close this section, (18) and (19) below exemplify how topic drifts are performed by associative cohesion without any
distinctive marker.
(18) BD 20
6: B: (23) Uh no (24) I was I I was invited as a guest <,> (25) Uh a friend took me to the local spiritualist church as a guest
(26) And the medium came to me in this open circle <,> (27) And she said various things (28) And she said youre
going to write <,,> (29) And she said and your Uncle Victor is standing at your side
(19) BD 21
2: B: (3) When its clear that uh United Nations resolutions are being complied with <,> (4) And that means
straightforwardly the unconditional withdrawal <,> from Kuwait uh so that we can restore the legitimate
government (5) And its been quite clear before this ever started that if Saddam Hussein would undertake to do that
and had done it by the deadline there would have been no hostilities (6) Hostilities will cease once its clear that he is
going back within his own territories and ending the invasion

In (18) the narrative line drifts from a rst person speaker I using simple past tenses in his narration to a third person point of
view she, another participant who chooses present progressive tenses, as a consequence of the associative cohesion relation
established in the immediate tie between spiritualist church and the medium. Likewise, in (19) the conversation drifts via
association and without any distinctive marker from the United Nations resolutions about the unconditional withdrawal from
Kuwait to Saddam Husseins responsibility for the hostilities in the area.
5. Conclusions
There are three main conclusions that may be drawn from this investigation stressing the context-specic and collaborative nature of lexical cohesion. First, broadcast discussions have a high incidence of lexical cohesion as a result of their
being opinionative conversations controlled by a chairperson and intended for an audience, although constrained by the production limitations of live performances. Second, lexical cohesion devices have been found to act as contextualization cues
by indexing or evoking frames within which inferential understanding is achieved. Repetition, the most frequent of them,
reveals itself as the most prominent topic continuity device (followed by synonymy and opposition), as well as a crucial
strategy to manage and organize turn-taking and the generic stages of the discussions. By contrast, associative cohesion
(ranking second in frequency) and inclusive relations generally contribute to shift attention to different aspects of a global
discourse topic or let the focus drift over related sub-topics. And third, the fact that ties are mostly produced across turns
over remote-mediated spans, regardless the number of speakers, evidences the highly collaborative nature of these interactions: speakers use lexical cohesion to connect their speech to each other across the turns, which reveals a strong genrebased determination to understand and to be understood to communicate. Further research of this kind is essential to fully
understand the intricacies of lexical cohesion, as well as its role within the broader study of linguistic practices and social
interaction.
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