isotopy [Grk ísos tópos ‘the same place’]

A term used in text linguistics that was taken from chemistry. The repetition of words of the same area of meaning in a text, e.g. doctor, fever, injection, fee. Isotopy is based on the repetition of a semantic feature and is therefore a particular kind of recurrence and thus a text-forming tool of cohesion or coherence. The thematic complexity of a text is reflected in the number of levels of isotopy. In its broadest sense, isotopy also refers to the repetition of syntactic and phonological elements in a text.