Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Ágnes Deli: Meaning with lexical repetition

DELI ÁGNES MEANING WITH LEXICAL REPETITION Abstract: The paper examines repeated lexical items in dialogical discourse concentrating on the role of repetition in the process of text development. In terms of the relationship between lexical meaning and the context the following claims will be made: Lexical repetition is not necessarily semantic repetition; a repeated lexical item may carry contextually new information. In discourse repeated words have an existential paradigm. Sense selection from the existential paradigm is marked prosodically, by prominence and tone. To describe the interdependence of grammatical and lexical cohesion Hasan (1984) uses the technical term 'COHESIVE CHAIN'. In Halliday and Hasan (1985) she explains her term as follows: "... a chain is formed by a set of items each of which is related to the others by the semantic relation of co-reference, co-classification and/or co-extension. Taking the type of relation into account, we can sub-categorise chains into two types: IDENTITY CHAINS and SIMILARITY CHAINS" (ibid.:84). She exemplifies the two types of relationship in a text, in which I with girl, and she is an identity chain, whereas went with walk is a similarity chain. This model seems to suggest that all repeated lexical items of a text are related in an identity chain. This is not necessarily true, however, especially not so in conversation. In the following extract speaker B evaluates a housewife's work repeating the noun work three times, and her addressee, speaker A, expresses agreement by repetition, too: 105