Lexical Cohesion: Some Implications of an Empirical Study

Lexical cohesion refers to the perceived unity of text achieved by the author’s usage of words with related meanings[1]. Data from an experiment with 22 readers aimed at eliciting lexical cohesive patterns they see in 10 texts [2, 3] is used to shed light on a number of theoretical and applied aspects of the phenomenon: which items in the text carry the cohesive load; what are the appropriate data structures to represent cohesive texture; what are the relations employed in cohesive structures.

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