Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 646):
The occurrence of a synonym even where there is no particular referential relation is still cohesive; for example, see Text 9-11
Text 9-11: Recreating – narrating (written, monologic): limerick
There was a man of Thessaly
And he was wondrous wise.
He jumped into a hawthorn bush
And scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw his eyes were out
With all his might and main
He jumped into a quickset hedge
And scratched them in again.
where the quickset hedge is not the same entity as the hawthorn bush but there is still cohesion between the synonyms hedge and bush.
Blogger Comments:
To be clear, referential relations are distinct from, and irrelevant to, the functioning of lexical cohesion.