Advances in Corpus-based Contrastive Linguistics - Studies in honour of Stig Johansson

Cohesive substitution in English and German 209

Substitution is thus a purely textual relation, if by that claim we mean that what
is substituted is not a referent or lexical denotations, but rather groups of words.
However, through this process semantic relationships are established or clued,
usually involving type reference.
Moving on to row 2, we notice that linguistic realizations are different in the
three types of phenomena discussed here. Reference in English and German seems
to be realized through pronouns, determiners, adjectives, and adverbs. Where co-
reference is established to verbal phrases, it is done through pronominal means, as
in the case of extended or textual reference through it/this/that or German es/dies/
das/der. With substitution, there are, differently for the two languages, nominal,
verbal and adverbial pro-forms. With lexical cohesion, finally, there is no lexi-
cal type restriction. Halliday and Hasan (1976: 291) rightly point out that noun,
nominal, nominalize, nominalization are all lexically cohesive. And to the extent
that map and cartographic, or young, youth and juvenile are lexically cohesive, we
would have strong evidence that lexical cohesion proceeds through word senses,
rather than forms.

Table 2. Delineating types of cohesion

Reference Substitution Lexical cohesion
1 Type of linguistic
relation

Semantic,

instantiated

co-reference

Grammatical,

involving type-

reference/

co-denotation

Semantic, lexical

relations between

different types

2 Linguistic form of
cohesive devices

Pro-nominal,

adjectival, adverbial,

determiners

Nominal, verbal and

adverbial pro-forms

Different lexical

parts of speech

3 Grammatical
constraints

None Same function as

antecedent

None

4 Substitutability by
antecedent

Dependent

on context

Yes In case of repetition

5 Type of semantic
relation

Identity Contrast Similarity

6 Type of referents Instantiated,
incrementally
enriched

Non-instantiated

classes/types

Non-instantiated

classes/types

7 Type of phoricity Ana-/exo-/
cataphoric

Anaphoric only Does not apply

8 Chain size Unlimited Limited (mostly two
elements)

Unlimited

9 Distance Clause, sentence,
paragraph, text

Clause, sentence Clause, sentence,

paragraph, text