THE ROLE OF REPETITION IN PERCEPTIONS OF DISCOURSE COHERENCE

Ever since it was first proposed as part of Halliday and Hasan's (1976 ) general model of text cohesion, the construct of lexical cohesion ha s had great appeal. Under this model, the presence of lexical repetiti on and related semantic items, in conjunction with schemata (Halliday and Hasan, 1985), contributes to text coherence by creating cohesive t ies within the text. However, this model has been criticized by Morgan and Sellner (1980), Green and Morgan (1981) and Green (1989) for conf using lexical repetition and anaphoric reference with the natural cons equences of staying on topic and general pragmatic principles. Using a n integrated discourse framework (Ellis and Roberts, 1987; Gumperz, 19 82a; Tyler et al., 1988), this paper puts forward a third position whi ch accepts the general outlines of the arguments posed by Green, Morga n and Sellner while arguing that certain patterns of repetition do mak e an independent contribution to discourse comprehensibility. By compa ring discourse produced by a native speaker of English with an English text produced by a native speaker of Chinese, the effect of particula r patterns of lexical repetition on text coherence is highlighted. The paper argues that lexical repetition serves to provide context-situat ed definitions of words and phrases and to provide a discourse-specifi c synonym set; the absence of these patterns of repetition contributes to a perception of incoherence in the non-native discourse examined h ere.