What can literature do for linguistics? Metaphorical synonymy and distant cohesion in James Joyce's Ulysses

 

Through analyses of selected passages from James Joyce's Ulysses, this article demonstrates how the challenging of the boundaries between linguistics and literary studies can be more than a one-way process aimed at uncovering linguistic patterns of literary texts. The theoretical basis of the article is Halliday & Hasan's concept of cohesion as presented in Cohesion in English (1976). While demonstrating the usefulness of Halliday & Hasan's approach in literary analysis by uncovering aspects of Joyce's extensive use of cohesion as a meaning-making resource, the application of their approach to Joyce's novel at the same time points to useful adjustments of the concept. It is thus argued that just like more regular examples of synonymy proper, metaphorical relations between lexical items which are usually semantically far apart are cohesive, too, as are ties which stretch over considerably longer passages than those typically considered in analyses of cohesion. While arguing for certain extensions of Halliday & Hasan's cohesive categories, the article simultaneously acknowledges and discusses methodological problems involved in such extensions and furthermore considers the upper and lower limits of cohesion