VERBS AS THE MEANS OF COHESION AND COHERENCE IN ENGLISH LITERARY TEXT

Abstract

Summary. The article deals with verbal means of cohesion and coherence in English literary texts. The theoretical and methodological framework of the study constitute M. A. K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, lexical priming theory by M. Hoey and discourse analysis, supported by quantitative corpus data. The source of the study are the prose fiction works by the contemporary Canadian author Margaret Atwood. The realization of cohesion and coherence with the help of verbal means has been analyzed in the texts. It has been established that cohesion is achieved by means of verb grammar: the use of appropriate tense forms as means of temporal deixis, alternation of active and passive tenses, simple and complex sentences, syntactic repetitions, lexical and grammatical transformations, in particular verb substitution, and deictic means to denote spatial relations. Coherence in the text is ensured by a number of associative relations with verbs within the text: synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, entailment, presuppositions, implicatures, repetitions, key verbs, typical verb collocations, etc. Certain verbal cohesion means have been identified on the basis of computer text processing: the key verbs, the typical collocations, and the verbal patterns. The conducted analysis confirms the significance of verbs in ensuring the textual metafunction of language. It has been established that in the analyzed works of prose fiction by M. Atwood, an associative semantic network is built around the verbs, in which verbs act as activation nodes. The verbal paradigmatic lexico- semantic relations activated in the texts testify to the verb’s contribution to textual coherence. Thus, the study of the text creating potential of the English verb contributes to the holistic view of its functional potential.