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Semantic Discontinuity
Literacy

Halliday points out that 'writers sometimes Interlocking

make semantic leaps, across which the definitions
reader is expected to follow in order to
Technical taxonomies
reach a required conclusion' Consider the
sentences below: Special expressions

Lexical density
• If the sea became polluted and the
Syntactic ambiguity
shellfish died off- this would alter
the number of other living-things. Grammatical
• Because heat passes through them metaphor
quickly, metals usually feel cold.
Semantic
discontinuity
In each of the sentences the writer has left
the reader with something to do. The reader
has to insert 'a logical relation' between the The use of active and
clauses. In the first sentence, the reader is passive voice
expected to realise that pollution kills The use of pronouns
shellfish and then make the connection that
if there were less shellfish then the balance Complex sentences
of the ecosystem would be upset which, in
turn, results in changes in the numbers in The use of
the populations of particular animals. This connectives
sentence could easily be read as:

If the following conditions are met: shellfish dying and the sea becoming
polluted then, the number of other living things will change.

It could also be read as:

If the sea became polluted then the number of living-things changes and
shellfish die off.

The second sentence is equally ambiguous. If we first re-write the sentence in

an effort to remove some of the structural ambiguity it becomes:

Heat passes through metals quickly and so they often feel cold.

This is clearly not a reason for metals feeling cold. A metal fork in a flame lets
heat pass through it quickly and will certainly not feel cold if someone was to
handle it. The semantic leap here is that the writer has completely missed out
the explanation and circumstances in which a metal will feel cold. If a student
was to arrive at the intended meaning, they would have an awful lot of
information to fill in. They would have to add the bracketed terms in the
paragraph below.

Heat passes through metals quickly (they are good thermal conductors).
(When we handle a metal object at room-temperature, the heat from our
hands travels from our hands through the metal object. Heat is taken from our
hands and) so the metal feels cold.
 Other reasons why scientific writing is difficult

There are a number areas of written English which make it difficult to

understand. We have identified four areas which we feel cause difficulty but
which are not exclusively found in scientific writing. These are:

The use of active and passive voice

The use of pronouns

Complex sentences

The use of connectives

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