Organizing the wastebasket: A semantic system for describing inter-clausal collocation
Abstract
Halliday & Hasan’s 1976 theory of cohesion in English explains the way meaning continues from one clause to another, connecting sentences through cohesive ties. Responding to this theory, and specifically their system of lexical cohesion, this thesis proposes a semantic system that structures collocational ties under a single semantic paradigm of lexical relations, alongside current paradigms of established relations like hyponymy and synonymy. The semantic system incorporates models from Raskin & Nirenburg’s (2004) Ontological Semantics to investigate the seeming complexity of collocational ties and renders an organized set of choices, translated into SFL metalanguage, for describing lexical relations. This system can be used for a number of applications. I propose a few applications of the theory for writing classroom curriculum, in the tradition of Witte & Faigley (1981) and Stotsky (1983). One classroom application utilizes ontology-making as a pedagogical tool for invention, helping students build domainspecific vocabularies in order to create more possibilities for expansion in the drafting process. The use of these vocabularies would serve as a scaffold for more quality writing, which writing studies experts have argued, is marked by high percentage of collocation (Witte & Faigley 1981; Stotsky 1983).
Degree
M.A.
Advisors
Raskin, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Linguistics|Rhetoric
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