212 Kerstin Kunz and Erich Steiner
(8) A stranger entered the room. He took off his coat, he took off his gloves. He
wasn’t going to be cold in here. (incrementally enriched/specified referent) vs.
(9) A stranger entered the room. He took off his coat, he took off his gloves. And
suddenly there was a second one.
The difference between (8) and (9) is due to the fact that cohesive reference, but
not substitution, involves instantiated and updated co-reference as a key phe-
nomenon, as has been noted by others before (Halliday & Hasan 1976: 288ff;
Schreiber 1999: 130): the referent man indexed by the third he in (8) has removed
his coat and gloves, but the class of strangers denoted by one in (9) is under-
specified in this respect. Lexical cohesion is similar to substitution/ellipsis in
not involving instantiated co-reference, yet it may well involve saturation of the
meanings of each lexical item in a chain by (some of the) invoked sense relations
to the other members. More specifically, whereas the lexical sense of any lexical
items involves all its synonyms, superordinate and subordinate terms, antonyms
etc., the particular lexical chain in which it is embedded in each text will fore-
ground a subset of these.
If we next look at the type of ‘phoricity’ involved (row 7), we find that ref-
erence occurs as ‘exophoric’, ‘anaphoric’ or ‘cataphoric’, whereas substitution is
largely restricted to the anaphoric type. For lexical cohesion, the question does not
arise because the web of relations exists among all elements of a chain. Trivially,
of course, earlier elements could be called ‘antecedents’. Being lexical, however, all
elements in a lexically cohesive chain denote types/classes in their own right so
that there is no ‘anaphor’ or specifically grammaticalized cohesive item as such.
Note also that, lexical items being words, not phrases, they do by definition not
refer in themselves, so ‘exophoric’ reference, i.e. reference to the extralinguistic
context of situation is out of the question. General nouns, as well as general verbs,
though, are on the borderline between co-reference, substitution and lexical cohe-
sion in that they have a bleached meaning, thus approaching pro-forms.
Finally, we note differences with respect to the nature of the chains established.
First chain size in row 8 refers to the number of textual elements pointing to
the same referent in a co-reference chain, the same type of referent by substitute
forms or the same or similar type of referent by a lexical word, in the case of lexi-
cal chains. Co-reference chains and lexical chains may contain a large number of
elements spanning vast stretches of text, whereas ties of substitution are mostly
established locally, between two elements only (row 8). Second, distance in row 9
refers to the textual distance between elements of chains. While the distance may
vary substantially in chains of co-reference and lexical cohesion, with substitution
it seems to be limited to spanning only two adjacent clauses or sentences (row 9).
This is apparently due to the specific nature of the conceptual relationship.