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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9. STAGE 5: THE NEW ANALYTICAL TOOL: REFERENTIAL COHESION IN RESEARCH ARTICLES AND MA THESES
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9.6. Results: Patterns of Referential Cohesion
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9.6.7. The distribution of types of cohesive reference in MA theses and RAs
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9.6.7.1. Demonstrative and pronoun reference in MA theses and research articles

9.6.7.1. Demonstrative and pronoun reference in MA theses and research articles

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Before jumping into the discussion of the characteristics of the two corpora in detail, let us look at the whole set of data. For ease of reference, the reference items for the item types are repeated here from Figure 9. The lexical items in Figure 9 were the ones searched. Figure 21 shows the total number of times these items occurred in each corpus, with the averages of normalized frequency counts. The greatest difference between MA theses and RAs appears to be in the frequency of the definite article, which in the RA corpus is lower than in either category of theses. Contrary to this, other kinds of demonstratives, which lend the opportunity for more specific reference, appear more often in RAs. As for adverbials, there is no notable difference. What is again interesting is that RA writers use much fewer pronouns than thesis writers. This is especially obvious looking at the category of singular pronouns (he, him, his, she, her, hers) with less than half as many pronouns used in RAs as in either lower or higher rated theses.
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Figure 21 Total number of demonstratives and pronouns in MA theses and Research Articles
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Interestingly, the parallelism of MA theses in contrast with RAs remains with the cohesively used items counted, as shown in Figure 22. While it shows almost the same pattern, the high rated thesis corpus stands somewhat closer to RAs in terms of their frequently used types of cohesive ties than the low rated one.
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Figure 22 Cohesive items in MA theses and Research Articles
Note: Figures 21 and 22 show data based on the sum of the averages of items from each corpus. In Figure 21, the normalized data is multiplied by 100 for each type of item, and in Figure 22, by 1000 for easier comparison. Abbreviations: Def. Art. = the definite article, Demonstr. = Demonstratives, sing. = singular, pl.= plural, pron. = pronoun.
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

According to Biber et al.’s (1991, 91) corpus findings, pronouns are relatively rare in academic prose, which is supported by the preliminary RA analysis results as well. In fact, the actual numbers of pronouns for each corpus were the following: 1839 in 20 RAs, 3769 in the 10 high rated and 4366 in 10 low rated theses. For each corpus, the neutral pronoun it made up one third of the instances. In order to compare the corpora, again, normalized data was used. In this analysis the focus was on cohesive reference in particular; therefore, Figure 23 shows the detailed results for the cohesive use of each type of item. Possessive determiners (his, hers, theirs) are missing; virtually no items were found.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

The most frequent items in all three corpora were the nominal pronouns, followed by possessives. In all three corpora, they, their, it, she and he are the pronouns that have the greatest role in establishing cohesive ties. Apparently, as shown in Table 21, for most of these pronouns it is true that they are slightly more frequent in MA theses than in RAs, but low rated theses differed greatly with much higher frequency items in the case of all the pronouns, except for its and their.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Besides the quantities of different types of ties, another feature that adds to the overall picture of pronoun use in these corpora is the proportion of cohesively used items out of the total amount of each type of item. Table 21 shows a summary of these proportions. Presumably, the highest proportion of items that establish cohesive ties with other sentences is found (for almost all the items) in low rated MA theses. Apparently, Research articles contain a larger number of pronouns used for non-cohesive, sentence-internal (grammatical reference) than MA theses. Apart from grammatical reference, the neutral pronoun has a multitude of non-cohesive functions, which explains its low proportion of cohesive ties.
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Figure 23 Cohesive personal reference
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

But what is the explanation for the differences between the corpus of theses and RAs? What functions do personal pronouns fulfill in academic writing? There were three such functions identified in the corpus:

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

  • reference to authors of previous research,
  • reference to research participants,
  • reference to research tools, tasks, procedures.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Therefore, the rest of this section deals with these three functions fulfilled by cohesive pronoun reference.
 

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Table 21 Ratio of cohesively used pronoun reference items

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Note: The most frequent, nominative pronouns are in bold.
 
9.6.7.1.1. Reference to authors
9.6.7.1.2. Reference to research participants
9.6.7.1.3. Non-human referents
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