Lexical Relationship in Discourse Cohesiveness of Spoken Texts in the Kisa Dialect of Luhya Language

Abstract

Cohesiveness of a text is an important feature in the making of meaningful and communicative texts, which is the goal of speech and writing. Establishing the resource for cohesive ties is thus of considerable importance to users of any given language, and, more so, those venturing into professional writing. The present study therefore delineated and analysed lexical relationships in spoken texts in the Kisa dialect of Luhya language, with a view to establishing ways in which these lexical relationships contribute to the cohesiveness of texts. It was found out that Kiss speakers exploit a number of lexical relationships such as synonymy, homonymy, antonymy, hyponymy and polysemy to develop their speech into a meaningful whole. This, they achieve through their choice of different lexical items facilitated by a number of factors such as: adherence to the expected conversational functions, the context of usage or situation of occurrence, the topic of discussion, the participants, and the semantic field of the lexical items. De Beaugrande and Dressler‘s (1981) model of textuality constituted the theoretical framework employed in this study. This approach was relevant to the present study because it gave a functional account to language use in text. Samples for the study were drawn from Kisa speakers in different settings such as the market place, the home, the church and in oral narrative sessions. Data collection was by the use of a tape recorder. The taped material was replayed and transcribed to constitute data for analysis. The results were analysed, interpreted, and described qualitatively. The findings of this study contribute to the body of knowledge in the area of Discourse analysis and Text linguistics, in that they show how cohesive texts are made in the Kisa dialect. The findings also help professional writers and translators by providing them with a large resource from which they may draw in the creation of meaningful and communicative texts. Lexicographers interested in coming up with dictionaries in the dialect are provided with a basis on which to peg meaning relationships between vocabularies in the dialect.