Cohesion and coherence in a content-specific corpus

Abstract

This paper is a tentative and incomplete exploration into whether there are any grounds for believing that the way cohesion is utilised and recognised is the result of priming. As a necessary consequence of the first goal, it is an investigation into the relationship between two ways of looking at lexis in text, the one associated with cohesion, the other associated with corpus linguistics. It is only perhaps because cohesion studies have taken a back seat in 21st century linguistics that there has not been more attention given to the terminological embarrassment that the term ‘collocation’ is currently used in two apparently quite separate ways in the linguistic literature, to mean in corpus linguistics the semi-arbitrary co-occurrence of two or more words and in cohesive studies the relationship between different lexical items in a text that contributes to the creation of coherence in the text. Such an investigation is also an investigation into the compatibility of the methodologies employed in corpus linguistics and cohesive studies, and this is an investigation in which I have a personal investment, since I have at different times been a student of cohesion and a corpus linguist.