Gabriella Jenei: Referential Cohesion in Academic Writing • A descriptive and exploratory theory- and corpus-based study of the text-organizing role of reference in written academic discourse
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8. STAGE 4: THE REPRESENTATION OF ERRORS IN THE COHESIVE REFERENCE ANALYSIS OF STUDENT ACADEMIC WRITING
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8.3. Taxonomy: reference errors in academic writing
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8.3.3. Problematic tracking of reference

8.3.3. Problematic tracking of reference

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

During the analysis, it was useful to distinguish between two types of problems in following chains of reference. First, items that are vague, where the question is which previous item the referent is, and second, chains that are problematic to track in the preceding text, because the chain of reference contains misleading items.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Longer chains of reference might be difficult to follow due to lexical problems. Presumably, as a result of the influence of the teaching of writing in Hungarian, students try to avoid lexical repetition, and use synonyms instead. In some cases, these synonyms might be misleading in English, as illustrated by some examples below. In example 3, there is an example of the misuse of a lexical item, which is probably only a mistake, but is a representative of similar problematic items that occur in an analysis of cohesion.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

1. the papers refers to questionnaires for teachers (TH9, s. 484) in an earlier sentence,
2. this type refers to one of three aspects listed earlier in the text (TH14, s. 235),
3. the examiner as a referring item when it is clear from the meaning of the text that the intended referent is the examinee: ...neither IH EURO nor ELC issue certificates unless the examiner has achieved the pass rates in all the exam parts (TH5, s. 440)
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Demonstrative determiners this and these are frequent in academic writing, as they “mark immediate textual reference” (Biber et al., 1999, 349; Swales & Feak, 1994, 25). In MA theses, students sometimes use that for the same intended meaning, as a result of which it is difficult for the reader to identify the referent.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

s. 18 My aim is to have a more or less full picture of what kinds of games are used [...].
s. 19 For that reason my research questions are the following: […]
(TH4)

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

A similar problem in the use of determiners is the place in which they occur in the text. It is not uncommon in student writing that a determiner is used in the first sentence of a subsection; that is, the intended reference holds across section boundaries, which is not an immediate textual context.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

s. 277 3.2 Modification of Research Questions
s. 278 Because of these difficulties I had to modify my field of research to some extent. (TH8, s. 278)

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

In relative clauses Dóczi and Prievara (2002, 8) recommend the use of the definite article in instead of determiners. However, Biber et al.’s (1991) corpus-based grammar suggests that it is indeed possible to use that/those for sentence-internal cataphoric reference, with the restriction that the reference of the demonstrative should be specified within the same sentence. Problematic uses of that/those in the corpus are those items where the anaphor of the referring demonstrative is not found within the same sentence, but points to a distant entity in the text, as in:

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

s. 278 Those steps that are included in the first theory are described in much more detail in the first six stages of the second one, clearly indicating that... (TH9)

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

A referring expression and its presupposed item should normally agree in gender and number. In the thesis corpus, problems in agreement occurred sometimes with other problematic areas: irregular plurals (e.g., stimuli referred to by it (TH12, s. 77–78)), the possessive ’s (e.g., one of the student’s (TH12, s. 501) where the noun should be plural instead of singular). It also happened that two elements in a cohesive chain simply did not match in number, as in s. 382–384 below, where the lesson in s. 384 refers to the plural classes in s. 382.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

s. 382 First of all, several English classes were observed ...
s. 383 The observation was guided and based on an observation sheet...
s. 384 Therefore, she decided to take field notes (Freeman, 1998) during the lesson on the basis of the categories of the observation sheet [...].
(TH12)
 
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