Lexical Cohesion Patterns and Genre Analysis

In this paper, we talk about the lexical cohesion patterns of a text in relation to its genre.First we present a simplified taxonomy of lexical relations mainly based on Martin (1992).Based on the taxonomy, we have illustrated how lexical items in an abstract form lexical strings and how lexical strings interact with each other.Lexical strings together build up a topic focus, i.e.the Field of the text.The result of our analysis shows that the major lexical strings in an abstract reflect the essential messages of the article and some of them may also appear in the title of the article.This finding helps to confirm our postulation that lexical realizations in a text are conditioned by the genre of the text.The purpose determines the genre of a text, and the purpose is, presumably, reflected at all levels of linguistic realizations of the text, as the purpose of an abstract is to introduce the essential messages of the source article.