AN INVESTIGATION INTO LEXICAL COHESION IN READING PASSAGES OF “SOLUTIONS” INTERMEDIATE BY TIM FAULLA & PAUL A DAVIS USED FOR ENGLISH MAJORED STUDENTS GRADE 10 OF BAC QUANG NAM HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIFTED STUDENTS
INTRODUCTION
Reading is considered to be very important among all skills which students need to master in English because it helps students to get materials for other skills. When reading for content information, the basic aim is not to learn the language but to comprehend. Without comprehension, reading is simply following words on a page from left to right.
In the seventies, when text analysis was at its first steps, a number of important works were published dealing with the term cohesion. The most widely known study was that of Halliday and Hasan [36] in which cohesion refers to relations of meanings that exist within the text. It is the non-structural resources for establishing relations within the text to construct discourse. It is cohesion that makes the interaction between reader and the text possible. Among five major types of cohesion is lexical cohesion, [36, p.120]. Lexical cohesion is a group of words which is lexically cohesive when all of the words are semantically related. The functions of lexical cohesion is to link word and word, phrase and phrase within a text by indicating a repetition, synonym, superordinate, and general word as well as co-occurrence of words whose meanings are related in the same environment [Halliday and Hasan, 1976, p.120]. Lexical cohesion considers the semantic relationship between lexical items. It cannot exist without text. Lexical items can have a significant structuring role in texts. As one of the most important cohesive mechanisms for the actualization of textual coherence, lexical cohesion has recently led to much debate in the field of applied linguistics and text lingustics.
It is the fact that many students have difficulty in reading and understanding a passage. Imagine you has just handed your students a text. They take a look and see it is written in a language totally foreign to them. After their initial confusion, they may try to make some sense of it and scan the document. While they may be able to phonetically decipher the words and sound them out, that is where their “reading” would end. They would not have any idea what the words they just read actually meant. They do not possess adequate language base to do what is expected of them, one of which is the lexical cohesion in the text. To Halliday [36], “lexical cohesion comes about through the selection of lexical items that are related in some way to those that have gone before” [36, p.310: 330]. The relation can be seen in his example:
(1.1) “Algy met a bear. The bear was bulgy“. [15]
In this sentence, the second occurrence of “bear” refers back to the first. Also, there is the referential link between the two items bear. Repetition therefore establishes a cohesive tie between at least two identical lexical items. This reiteration of items is the simplest form of lexical cohesion. Another proof to emphasize the necessity of understanding lexical cohesion in reading is the following example:
(1.2) “I heard a sound, but I couldn’t figure out where that noise came from.” [15]
The word “noise” above refers back to “sound”. Both terms have the same level of generality and are therefore synonyms in the narrower sense. Grasping this type of cohesion makes it easier to understand exactly what the speaker or the writer means.
Because of the importance of lexical cohesion in comprehending a text, especially for gifted students at the tenth grade in my school, the research entitled “An Investigation into Lexical Cohesion in Reading Passages of “Solutions Intermediate” by Tim Faulla & Paul A Davies Used for English Majored Students Grade 10 of Bac Quang Nam High School for Gifted Students “ was decided to be conducted.
1.2. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
The study aims:
– To investigate types of lexical cohesion in reading passages of “Solutions” Intermediate by Tim Faulla & Paul A Davies.
– To make some contribution to the better understanding of reading texts and the improvement of reading skill for 10th grade gifted students of Bac Quang Nam High School.
1.2.2. Objectives of the Study
For the above-mentioned aims, the study focuses on the following objectives:
– To find out common forms of lexical cohesion in reading passages of Solution Intermediate by Tim Faulla & Paul A Davies.
– To give some implications and suggestions for teaching the reading skill in general and at high schools in particular.
The study is to find out the answers to the following questions:
1. What are types of lexical cohesion used in reading passages of “Solutions” Intermediate by Tim Faulla & Paul A Davies?
2. What is the manifestation of lexical cohesion used in “Solutions” Intermediate?
3. What are the implications and suggestions for teaching the reading skill?
1.4. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
Reading skill is required in any English tests for high school students over the nation. Therefore, a better understanding of lexical cohesion can help students in analyzing reading passages in the course books.
The study focused on the lexical cohesion and their manifestation in reading passages of the Solution Intermediate by Tim Faulla & Paul A Davies.
1.6. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY
The study is organized into 5 chapters as follows.
– Chapter 1 includes the rationale, the aims and objectives, the research questions to solve, the significance, the scope and the organization of the research.
– Chapter 2 consists of two parts. The first part is a review of previous studies related to this thesis. The second one is concerned with theoretical knowledge related to issues under discussion.
– Chapter 3 presents the method of the study, the sampling and population, the data collection, data analysis, the instruments, the reliability and validity.
– Chapter 4 concerns about the description of types of lexical cohesion, analysis and discussion of the results, from which findings are drawn out.
– Chapter 5 is about the suggestions for teaching and learning English reading at high schools.
CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW
AND THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
2.1. OVERVIEW
In order to lay the foundation in theory for the analysis of the points mentioned in the first chapter, this chapter provided background knowledge of the terms concerned, including knowledge of cohesion as well as types of lexical cohesion. However, before presenting the theories related to the research, a brief review of previous studies related to the investigated problem was firstly mentioned.
2.2. REVIEW OF PREVIOUS STUDIES RELATED TO THE RESEARCH
Cohesion has been studied by many linguists with different points of view. According to Halliday and Hasan [36], there are two main types of cohesion: grammatical cohesion, referring to the structural factors, and lexical cohesion, referring to the meaning aspect of the piece. A cohesive text is created in various ways. In Cohesion in English, Halliday and Hasan [36] identified five general categories of cohesion that create coherence in texts, namely reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion.
In response to Halliday and Hasan [36], Hoey in the book entitled Patterns of Lexis in Text [41, p.260] subsumed Halliday and Hasan’s categories of textual cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis and the two subclasses of lexical cohesion with the exception of conjunctions. He emphasized the importance of grammatical and lexical features of the sentences in connecting to other sentences in the text.
Malmkjar [51] suggested another opinion that cohesion concernd the way in which the linguistic items of which a text was composed. He agreed with Halliday and Hasan [36] that reference, ellipsis and conjunction helped to link clauses which were near each other in the text while lexical cohesion linked much larger parts of the text. He thought that cohesion was formed thanks to the presence of explicit linguistic links which provided recognizable structure, such as she, this, after, therefore, and but.
Besides, Bex [9] emphasized the aspect of semantic and grammatical properties in cohesion. Hatch [39] further stated the significance of using both cohesive ties and lexical ties in promoting cohesion. In addition, Nunan [57] supplied cohesion description and analysis like those of Halliday. Meanwhile Yule [73] interpreted that cohesion could be obtained from lexical relationships like hyponymy, part-whole, collocability, by structural relationships, syntactic repetition or stylistic choice.
Joining the trend of cohesion study, Tran Ngoc Them [83] further developed cohesion into two aspects of content cohesion and form cohesion.
Diep Quang Ban [83] through a research in Vietnamese texts agreed that content cohesion was subcategorized into collocation, antonomy, logical cohesion and indirect cohesion while form cohesion was divided into four categories: lexical repetition, substitution and syntactic signs.
There were also other researches in master thesis which investigate lexical cohesion in certain aspects, such as Dao Nguyen Tieu Quyen [63] in the mosaic of VOA special English, Le Thi Phuong [62] in English and Vietnamese economic news or Nguyen Thi Phuoc Da [24] through brief news.
To make lexical cohesion be thoroughly grasped, a study on Solutions Intermediate course book by Tim Faulla & Paul A Davies currently used as the official English Language textbook for English Majored Students Grade 10 of Bac Quang Nam High School for Gifted Students was decided to be conducted.
Cohesion is a semantic concept; it refers to relations of meaning that exist within the text, and that define it as a text. Text can exist without lexical cohesion, though lexical cohesion cannot exist without text [Brown & Yule, 12, p.132].
Halliday and Hasan [36] argued that concept of cohesion was semantic one. For them, it refers to relation of meaning that “exists within the text, gives the text texture”.
According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistic by Mathews [50], cohesion is defined as a close relationship based on grammar or meaning between two parts of a sentence or a larger piece of writing. In the aspect of meaning, it is the relations between two or more elements in a text that are independent of the structure. For example, for a personal pronoun and an antecedent proper name, such as Aleena…..she. A semantic relation of this kind may be set up either within a sentence with the consequence that when it crossed a sentence boundary it had the effect of making the two sentences cohere with each other.
On the other hand, towards grammatical aspect, smaller linguistic units such as words, phrases, and clauses were joined together through cohesive devices (conjunctions) to construct a larger unit of text. Cohesive relation fitted into the overall pattern of language. Therefore, cohesion was expressed partly through vocabulary and partly through grammar. It was a part of text forming component in the linguistic system. It linked together the elements that were structurally unrelated through the dependence of on the other for its interpretation. Without cohesion, the semantic system couldnot be effectively activated at all.
The various kinds of cohesion had been outlined by Halliday [37] in his writing on stylistics and the concept was developed by Hasan [38]. They both agreed that cohesion was no more structural, it was external, marked by “lexico-grammatical items” [37, p.132].
A study of theoretical sources has revealed that cohesion has been one of the most productive areas in the investigation of texts (Halliday and Hasan [36], Brown and Yule [12], Gutwinski [35], Hoey [41], Thompson [71]). It was obvious that important insights could contribute to further analyses and helped researchers figure out and understand how cohesion could be employed to fulfill semantic relations of a text.
A concept of relations of meaning was revealed in various interpretations. As Scott and Thompson [71] stated, “cohesion depends on repetition within the text” (2001: 14). Hoey [41] described cohesive ties that “require the reader to look to the surrounding sentences for their interpretation”. “Cohesion occured where the interpretation of some element in the discourse was dependent on that of another” [37, p.4].
Introducing various definitions of cohesion, scholars made an attempt to clarify what role it played in the construction of a text. Different sets of cohesive resources established different kinds of boundaries and might signal different kinds of links in a text [37, p.57]. According to Nunan [57], text-forming devices “enable the writer and speaker to establish relationships across sentence or utterance boundaries” [37, p.21].
Stoddard [69] defined cohesion as a mental construct. This definition implied that cohesion must be interpreted and it required mental effort on the part of the reader. In other words, cohesion required to search for certain words or grammatical items that helped to impart meaning and purpose to clauses and sentences, so that information was distributed in a logical way.
In short, the concept of cohesion is a semantic one. It refers to relations of lexical items that exist within the text. Between sentences, there are no structural relations, and this is where the study of cohesion becomes important
Cohesion and coherence are terms used in discourse analysis and text linguistics to describe the properties of written texts. Cohesion and coherence are related notions, but they are clearly distinct. The distinction between them has not always been clarified partly because both terms come from the same verb cohere which means sticking together. In fact, cohesion is the network of different kinds of formal relations that provide links between or among various parts of a text, and is expressed partly through the grammar and partly through the vocabulary. Coherence, on the other hand, is understood as the quality of being meaningful and unified.
Coherence refers to the type of semantic of rhetorical relationships that under texts. Richards, Platt, Webster [67] stated that: “Coherence refers to the rhetorical devices, to ways of writing and speaking that bring about order and unity and emphasis. Coherence can obtain on the basis of relevance, the co-operative principle, the common shared background knowledge between participants in a speech event, and how discourse is structured, as well”. Moreover, they also add that coherence is the relationships which link the meanings of utterances in discourse or of the sentences in a text. In addition, Nguyen Hoa [78] stated that coherence was built upon semantic ties in discourse. Therefore, if cohesion refered to the linguistic elements that made a discourse semantically coherent, then coherence involved with what makes a text semantically meaningful. In short, coherence was embodied by a system of cohesive devices and cohesion was mainly used to ensure coherence.
Cohesion was necessary, though not sufficient in the creation of coherent texts. In other words, cohesion was a crucial though not exclusive factor contributing to coherence, since it facilitated the comprehension of underlying semantic relations.
Cohesion was a formal network which connected or linked many parts of a text together by grammar or words. Meanwhile, coherence was the connections which brought interpretation of linguistic messages.
The concept of cohesion was closely connected to the concept of coherence .
Cohesion refered to the grammatical and lexical elements on the surface of a text which could form connections between parts of the text while coherence, on the other hand, resides not in the text, but is rather the outcome of a dialogue between the text and its listener or reader.
Cohesion included semantic relationships between sentences and within sentences while coherence covers relationships dealing with text as a whole. There were fewer formal linguistic features in coherence (e.g: vocabulary choice) than in cohesion (e.g: repetition, reference).
Cohesion was determined by lexically and grammatically overt intersentential relationships; however, coherence is based on primarily semantic ones.
An additional point to consider was the implication of the varying concepts regarding the relationship between cohesion and coherence. Hoey [41], for instance, argued that the two were not synonymous. He continued that unlike coherence, cohesion could be judged rather objectively as there were identifiable linguistic features that could establish cohesive ties. Coherence, on the other hand, was viewed to be subjective, as two readers or listeners could have different evaluations of the same text.
A clear distinction between cohesion and coherence is also argued by De Beaugrande and Dressler [25]. Hasan [38] claimed that the degree of coherence correlates with the degree of interaction between cohesive chains.
Cohesion was usually interpreted in contrast to coherence. Scholars paid attention to the fact that both terms could be easily confused. Both refer to text-forming mechanisms, but it did not presuppose that they were synonymous.
Some discourse analysts determined these concepts from contextual or linguistic points of view. Thus, cohesion was defined either as an evaluative measure of texts or as linguistic devices used for putting sentences together [69, p.54]. Halliday and Hasan [36] presented cohesion as linguistically determined. It was worth mentioning that coherence was not defined in the work of Halliday and Hasan [36] who had been influential in the discussion of cohesion. They described the concept of coherence under the term of texture.
In short, cohesion and coherence aren’t too difficult to recognize. The following illustrations will make the problem easier.
(2.1) My favourite colour is blue. I like it because it is calming and it relaxes me. I often go outside in the summer and lie on the grass and look into the clear sky when I am stressed. For this reason, I’d have to say my favourite colour is blue. [97]
The sentence above is both coherent and cohesive. However, we would like to make it clearer through more detailed analysis as below. Here is a sentence that has cohesion but is not coherent.
(2.2) My favourite colour is blue. Blue sports cars go very fast. Driving in this way is dangerous and can cause many car crashes. I had a car accident once and broke my leg. I was very sad because I had to miss a holiday in Europe because of the injury. [97]
As is seen from the sentence, there is plenty of cohesion here. The sentences connect clearly together, but if you read the paragraph, it really makes no sense in the way that the author starts talking about blue and finishes talking about a holiday in Europe. There is no coherence at all.
Now let’s take a look at a sentence that is coherent but not cohesive.
(2.3) My favourite colour is blue. I’m calm and relaxed. In the summer, I lie on the grass and look up. [97]
This is more difficult to understand but basically this lack of cohesion means a lack of sufficient connectors to join the ideas together.
For after all, when we look at cohesion in a text, concerns on coherence are not far away.
2.3.2. Lexical Cohesion
a. The Concept of Lexical Cohesion
There has been many definitions of lexical cohesion so far. In the concept of Halliday and Hasan [36], it was a linguistic device which helped to create unity of text and discourse. In contrast to grammatical cohesion, lexical cohesion was the cohesive effect achieved by the selection of vocabulary. According to Carter [15], lexical cohesion was the mean by which text was linguistically connected. In addition, Martin [53] suggested that it was a set of discourse semantic system.
Lexical cohesion is “phoric” cohesion that is established through the structure of the lexis, or vocabulary, and hence (like substitution) at the lexicogrammatical level. While reference, ellipsis, and conjunction tend to link clauses which are near each other in the text, lexical cohesion tends to link much larger parts of the text.
Lexical cohesion is created by reiteration and collocation. Reiteration involves the repetition of a lexical item, while collocation is the way in which particular words tend to occur or belong together. Halliday and Hasan [36] classify reiteration into four types: the same word (or repetition), a synonym/ near-synonym, a superordinate, and a general word. For example, “a boy” can be replaced in the following sentences with “the boy” (the same word), “the lad” (a synonym/ near-synonym), “the child” (a superordinate), and “the idiot” (a general word) [36, p.279-280].
A reiterated item may be not a pure repetition of a lexical item. It may be a synonym or near-synonym, a superordinate or a general word. Moreover, lexical cohesion can be also achieved by the use of complementaries, or different kinds of pairs of opposites (boy – girl), antonyms (like – hate) and converses (order – obey) (Halliday and Hasan 1976, p.285). A synonym is a word that has the same or similar meaning as another word. Synonyms are used to avoid repetition of the exact same word. A superordinate is a lexical
item whose meaning is included within that of another word. It is “any item that dominates the earlier one in the lexical taxonomy” (Halliday and Hasan 1976, p.280). General words can be characterized by familiarity. Many general words carry a connotation of attitude on the part of the speaker (Halliday and Hasan 1976, p.280). These can be general nouns, like thing, stuff, person, woman, man, or general verbs, like do and happen. General nouns and verbs do not carry much information. They depend mostly on the co-text for their meaning, so that hearers or readers can identify what a particular word is referred to. General words are also described as superordinates of a higher level. Meanwhile, they recognize collocation as an important part of creating cohesion in connected text. Collocation refers to the semantic and structural relation among words, which native speakers can use subconciously for comprehension or production of a text.
Lexical cohesion is not necessarily achieved by two lexemes having the same referent. For example:
(2.4) Why does this little boy have to wriggle all the time?
Boys always wriggle.
Good boys don’t wriggle.
Boys should be kept out of here. [36]
The lexemes boy and boys are not coreferential. However, lexical cohesion here is achieved through comparative reference. It can be withdrawn that a lexical item coheres with a preceding occurrence of the same item whether or not the two have the same referent.
Lexical cohesion can also be achieved by using sets of lexical items which belong to the same semantic field, such as laugh/joke, garden/dig, bee/honey, boat/row, ill/doctor, … etc. The cohesive effect of such pairs is achieved through their tendency to share the same lexical environment, to occur in collocation with each other.
b. Text and Lexical Cohesion
A text is best regarded as a semantic unit- a unit not of form but of meaning. The semantic relationships of the lexical items used in a text are very important to the achievement of lexical cohesion.
In the view of Halliday and Hasan [36], text was employed to refer to discourse; they saw text as a semantic unit characterized by cohesion. In addition, they suggested that a cohesive force would produce a cohesive tie, which was the relationship between a cohesive item and the item it presupposed in a text. In other words, collocational links between lexical items created cohesion. Sharing the same ideas, Brown & Yule [12] supported that text was the representation of discourse and the verbal record of a communicative act. In other words, they all viewed the notion of text was the representation of discourse, text was the form of discourse and they had a close relationship. In spoken and written English discourses, accordingly, individual clauses and utterances were linked semantically by grammatical connections [54, p.26], which made a text cohesive.
The concept of texture was used to express the property of being a text [36, p.2]. Cohesion was one part of what was said to be textual. Various language resources used to express relationship to the environment fulfil the function of the textual component which characterized a text [36, p.299].
The concept of lexical cohesion couldnot be separated from the concept of text. A text could be spoken or written that did form a unified whole. What differed text and non-text lies on the texture which were constructed by cohesive relations, including lexical cohesion. According to Halliday and Hasan [36], the primary factor of whether a set of sentences did or did not constitute a text depends on cohesive relationships between and within the sentences which created texture. The texture was provided by the cohesive relation. The relation was presupposed and presupposing elements are integrated into a text.
It was significant to recognize that lexical cohesion couldnot exist without sentences. That was, cohesive words should be discussed not only as the meaning relations which held between items, but also as the explicit expression of those meaning relations within a text. Ultimately, it was necessary to consider lexical cohesion as “a set of discourse semantic system” [53, p.37].
Brown & Yule [12], on focusing on the relationship between cohesion and text, indicated that lexical cohesion was not always necessary for text to produce semantic relations between sentences, as in the following example:
(2.5) A: There’s the doorbell.
B: I’m in the bath.
[12]
These sentences have no lexical cohesion, but readers will understand that the sequence of sentences constitutes a text. This means that text can exist without lexical cohesion, though lexical cohesion cannot exist without text.
Lexical cohesion deals with the meaning in text. It is not a guarantee of unity in text but rather a device for creating it. It is the cohesion that arises from semantic relationship between words. Therefore, a text is a semantic unit whose parts are linked together by explicit cohesive ties.
Lexical cohesion can form relational patterns in text in a way that links sentences to create an overall feature of coherence with the audience, sometimes overlapping with other cohesion features. The understanding of how the content of sentences is linked helps to identify the central information in texts by means of a possible summary. This allows judgements on what the text is about.
c. Types of Lexical Cohesion
Halliday and Hasan [36] classify lexical cohesion into two main categories, reiteration and collocation.
c.1. Reiteration
Reiteration is the most direct and obvious source of lexical cohesion since it is the mere identical recurrence of a preceding lexical item. At one end of the scale, it is the use of a general word to refer back to the lexeme, and at the other end, it is a number of things between the use of synonym, near-synonym, or superordinate.
(2.6) • There was a large mushroom growing near her,
about the same height as herself; and, when she
had looked under it, it occurred to her that she
might as well look and see what was on the top
of it. She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and
peeped over the edge of the mushroom.
[36,p.277]
(2.7) • Accordingly, I took leave, and turned to the
ascent of the peak. The climb is perfectly easy.
[36,p.279]
(2.8) • Henry’s bought himself a new Jaguar.
He practically lives in the car.
[36,p.280]
In these instances, one lexical item refers back to another, to which it is related by having a common referent. This is called reiteration.
c.1.1. Same Word (or Repetition)
Lexical cohesion operates with repetition. It is just the simple repetition of a word, within a sentence with no particular placement of the words. The unity of the text is intentionally created thanks to the repetition of lexical items. Repetition is realized in instances that embrace the same lexical item used across the sentences
(2.9) Mary ate some peaches. She likes peaches very much. [36,p.279]
According to Tran Ngoc Them [83, p.96], any cohesive paragraph has necessary repetition. If there is some repetition in any sequence of sentences, there is cohesion.
Repetition can be defined as ‘multiple instances of an idea or word, and the greater the number of repetition the more we notice it’ [64, p.185]. According to Reynolds, it was this ‘quantity of occurrences’ that attracted the attention and emphasises the meaning. Lexical repetition was often seen as generating lexical cohesion [Halliday, 36, p.104]. According to Halliday and Hasan [36], lexical repetition contributed to the creation of a cohesive text, whereby lexical items across sentences and paragraphs formed a cohesive link that helped readers to follow meanings.
(2.10) In the days leading up to Poppy Day, about 32 million people in Britain buy and wear small poppies. Some people choose to wear white poppies because they think that white symbolises peace. [36, p.79]
In the example above, the words poppies or white is repeated to emphasize Poppy Day- a ceremony day of Britain for soldiers that died in wars.
The repetition of lexical items not only created a cohesive link between different segments of the text, but served as an indication of the writer’s creativity and was a feature of ‘elevated’ discourse [Gutwinski, 35, p.201].
Hoey [41] distinguished between simple and complex lexical repetition. The former one occured when a lexical item was repeated with no alteration. The latter occured when ‘two lexical items shared a lexical morpheme, but were not formally identical, or when they were formally identical, but had a different grammatical function’ [36, p.55].
(2.11) After a ten-hour training session, Mr Lim is ready to get some sleep, he simply rolls out a mattress. Like many of his profession, he prefers to sleep during the day and sit in front of his computer most of the night.
[33, p.49]
Both two words sleep in these sentences share the same meaning of not awake but they are different in part of speech.
c.1.2. Synonym or Near-Synonym
Synonym or near synonym is the second part of reiteration where two or more words with very closely related meaning or same meanings are often intersubstitutable in sentences.
(2.12) There’s a boy climbing that tree. The lad‘s going to fall if he doesn’t take care.
[36, p.280]
Clearly, in the example above, the word boy or lad has the same meaning but is flexibly used to make the sentence vivid.
Usually, synonyms differ in that they are used in different dialects , in different styles, in different combinations or in that the meanings of two words may overlap, but each has its own area as well. For instance, freedom and liberty are commonly treated as synonyms, but they appear in different combinations, because although we have freedom of expression and academic freedom, there is no generally corresponding liberty of expression or academic liberty.” [Lewis, 47, p.74].
In the book entitled How Language Works- Over look, Crystal [22, p.251] suggested that “The search for synonyms is a well-established classroom exercise, but it is as well to remember that lexemes rarely (if ever) have exactly the same meaning. There are usually stylistic, regional, emotional, or other differences to consider . … Two lexemes might be synonymous in one sentence but different in another” .
Synonyms can be any part of speech, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs or prepositions, as long as both words belong to the same part of speech. Those are illustration:
Adjectives: beautiful, lovely, gorgeous, stunning, striking
Nouns: house, home, dwelling, residence, abode, quarters
Verbs: jump, bound, leap, hop, skip
Prepositions: in, inside, within
Adverbs: fast, quickly, speedly
The important point to consider is that all of the above synonyms could be interchanged in a sentence. However, when replacing a word with its synonym, it is necessary to pay close attention to the context so that the synonym will convey the same meaning. For example:
My driver’s license has expired.
The word expired could not be replaced with the word die even though the two are synonyms. It would not make sense. Therefore, not every synonym of the word replaced will be a good choice.
AN INVESTIGATION INTO LEXICAL COHESION IN READING PASSAGES OF “SOLUTIONS” INTERMEDIATE BY TIM FAULLA & PAUL A DAVIS USED FOR ENGLISH MAJORED STUDENTS GRADE 10 OF BAC QUANG NAM HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIFTED STUDENTS
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