Lexical Cohesion and Meronymy in Selected Movie Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis of World War Z (2013)

Abstract

This study examines lexical cohesion with particular attention to meronymy in selected dialogue excerpts from the film World War Z (2013). The revision narrows the analytical scope to lexical-semantic relations so that the research objectives, data selection, and reported findings are methodologically consistent. Using a qualitative descriptive discourse-analysis approach, the article analyzes eight reported excerpts: four illustrating repetition, near-synonymy, a superordinate-specific relation, and associative collocation, and four illustrating part-whole relations involving body parts, spatial components, object components, and group members. The analysis follows Halliday and Hasan’s account of lexical cohesion while treating meronymy as a complementary lexical-semantic relation informed by Cruse and Saeed. The findings show that lexical relations connect meanings across adjacent turns by maintaining topic continuity, specifying categories, and associating crisis-related concepts. Meronymy contributes more specifically by linking salient parts to larger entities, allowing speakers to refer economically to bodies, locations, objects, and groups while preserving contextual continuity. The study contributes a focused account of how part-whole semantics can support cohesion in cinematic dialogue and clarifies the distinction between canonical lexical-cohesion categories and meronymic relations.