Preparation of texts for analysis: numbering sentences: Practically, all “full stop + space” sequences are replaced with “full stop + paragraph”, so that sentences all start in new lines and can be numbered automatically. While most of the work is done, it is important to check that Tables and Figures get numbered as one sentence and that abbreviations (as a result of the dot in them) do not divide single sentences into several.

Identifying cohesive and non-cohesive elements: Based on the types of referring items to be explored (personal, demonstrative and comparative reference; see Table 8, in Chapter 3) we highlight all the items. Then texts are tagged for all the items that are not cohesive (based on the non-cohesive categories we discussed in Chapter 7; see Table 19), using either the 5 broader categories, or the more specific subcategories, depending on the given research purposes. Errors may also be tagged, as some of them will be immediately obvious (see Figure 17 for the four main types). The method of tagging these items will obviously depend on the kind of software used (e.g., WordSmith, CLARK system) or can simply be entered in the document itself (even Microsoft Word can perform many search functions).

Creating a table to represent cohesive reference items. While the previous two steps could be carried out by any software, at present, cohesive chains of reference can only be carried out by human analysis. In addition, the analysis will inevitably reflect the reader’s interpretation of the given text and background knowledge. Ideally, this is at least the second reading of the analyzed, already familiar text. For each paper analyzed, a table is needed to represent relationships between sentences (e.g., an Excel table), where presupposed items will be entered in successive columns in the row representing the sentence (with the same number) in which it is found, and all referring items pointing to it will be entered under it, thus forming a chain (see Chapter 6 for details and Figure 6 for a sample analysis). The first (top) row can be frozen, where one can enter all the presupposed items, which will make it much easier to find presupposed items from previous text parts. Color coding helps not only to distinguish between different types of items, but also to count referring items. When in doubt about lexical relationships, the reader can refer to the lexical relations discussed in Chapter 5. Cohesive errors are indicated in the cohesion analysis table and are tagged in the analyzed text.

Data collection. For each text, all the information above was entered into a data collection sheet (see Appendix H), which included the formulae for normalizing the data as it was entered. The same sheet contained qualitative information and notes for each text. As the study is partly exploratory in nature, I also collected general observations, hypotheses emerging from the analysis of the given text, and a list of errors.