Lexical Cohesion and Meaning Construction
-- A Case Study of "Colors of the Wind" (1995)[1: See Appendix for the lyrics of "Colors of the Wind" (1995).]
Introduction
Michael Hoey's Patterns of Lexis in Text (1991) attaches great importance to how cohesive features combine to organize texts. In another word, he tries to see how lexical relation contributes to text patterning. Text is a meaning unit and text pattern is a catalyst of meaning generation. Therefore, lexical relation helps to construct texual meaning.
This paper chooses "Colors of the Wind" as the target text for analysis, the theme song of Disney movie Pocahontas (1995). And the case study intends to find how lexical relation helps to construct textual meaning.
Methodology
According to Hoey, sentences are said to be appropriately connected when at least three repetitions (where a bond is established) are found between two sentences, however far apart.
Pocahontas (1995 film)
Oxford University Press
"Captain Smith and Pocahontas" - Pocahontas saves ...Based on this principle, the author calculates lexical bonds in the song to scrutinize lexical cohesion and its relation to texual meaning construction. Different from narratives, song lyrics are not structurally-based but meaning-based. Singers usually stop at the end of a meaning unit (usually one paragraph). In order to make the methodology more applicable, this study treats paragraph as the basic unit of lexical bond calculation.
Findings
Table/Graph for lexical cohesion
1) | ||||||||
2) | 4 | 2) | ||||||
3) | 4 | 1 | 3) | |||||
4) | 2 | 2 | 1 | 4) | ||||
5) | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 5) | |||
6) | 3 | 4 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 6) | ||
7) | 4 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 7) | |
8) | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 8) |
Finding 1: Every paragraph is at least connected to one other paragraph.
Finding 2: Paragraph 1 has 6 lexical bonds, Paragraph 6 has 3, Paragraphs 2, 3, 7 have 2, and Paragraphs 4, 5, 8 have...