Towards Modern Linguistic Studies for Arabic Speech: The Study of Lexical Cohesion as an Example

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to stress that lexical repetition is the most important standard of textuality and that textual cohesion is primarily realized by this type of repetition. To show this, the study proposes and applies a technique for studying and quantitatively analyzing written Arabic texts by measuring the degree of lexical cohesion among the sentences of a given text. The analysis and measuring of lexical cohesion, according to the proposed linguistic technique, would enable text linguists to identify cohesively ‘bonded’ sentences, as well as to distinguish between cohesively ‘central’ and ‘marginal’ sentences in a text. The paper also demonstrates how the identification of the above three types of sentences can enable linguists, among other things, to produce cohesive and coherent text summaries which may range from 50% down to 10% of the length of the unabridged version of the original text. Such text summaries become possible by excluding cohesively ‘marginal’ sentences and combining all, or only highly cohesive or ‘central’, ‘basic’ sentences in a given text.