ABSTRACT
For several years now, Michael Hoey has been investigating the phenomenon of repeated sequences of lexical items in text and the relationship of these to the core sentences of a text. The phenomenon on which he has focused is known as “lexical cohesion”, and is one of the forms of textual cohesion described in Halliday & Hasan (1976). Hoey noticed that the recurrence of certain items across the sentences of a text could be used as an aid to identifying the “key” sentences of that text, where a “key” sentence can be characterized by its centrality to the text and the expressive power which it has in standing in for several other sentences.
