Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 648-9):
At the same time there are other instances of lexical cohesion that do not depend on any general semantic relationship of the types just discussed, but rather on a particular association between the items in question – a tendency to co-occur. This ‘co-occurrence tendency’ is known as collocation. For example,
A little fat man of Bombay
Was smoking one very hot day.
But a bird called a snipe
Flew away with his pipe,
Which vexed the fat man of Bombay.
There is a strong collocational bond between smoke and pipe, which makes the occurrence of pipe in line 4 cohesive. Clearly there is a semantic basis to a collocation of this kind; a pipe is something you smoke, and the words pipe and smoke are typically related as Range to Process in a behavioural process clause. Hence pipe here will be interpreted as ‘the pipe that he was smoking at the time’.
Blogger Comments:
To be clear, smoke is not a behavioural Process, if only because pipe is not a Behaviour (the Range of a behavioural Process).