Introducing English Linguistics

Lexical Cohesion.
The types of cohesion discussed so far “move hand
and hand,” Halliday and Hasan (1985: 83) note, with Lexical Cohesion,
which establishes a link with the prior context by, for instance, repeating
The structure of English texts
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a word mentioned earlier or using a synonym of the word. For instance,
in an example such as the one below, the reader/writer has a number of
options to link the second sentence with the first:
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INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS
(Halliday and Hasan 1976: 279)
I turned to the ascent of the peak.
is perfectly easy.
The ascent 
The climb 
The task 
The thing 
It
One way to create a link with the ascent is to simply repeat the phrase.
However, if such repetition is undesirable, a synonym such as climb can be
used instead. Other options include using progressively more general
words, such as task or thing, or simply a pronoun such as it, which involves
an earlier type of cohesion, Reference, rather than Lexical Cohesion.
Exactly which choice is made is guided on the one hand by clarity – the
need to use an expression that clearly refers back to something men-
tioned earlier – and the avoidance, where possible, of repetition. The
excerpt below illustrates how these two considerations work.