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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9.6.8. Summary of error types and strategies to overcome them
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9.6.8.3. Problematic tracking of reference

9.6.8.3. Problematic tracking of reference

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Out of the three types of problems that may block a cohesive chain (see Figure 25 above), agreement between the presupposed and the referring item was the one where the greatest difference was observed between the high- and low-rated corpus. The almost twice as many agreement errors in the low rated corpus compared to the high rated one mainly involved reference to a plural form by a singular form (or sometimes the other way around) with the intention of the writer (an assumption based on the textual context) to refer to the same number of items. Low rated theses writers also had a number of accuracy errors related to irregular plural nouns or uncountable nouns, which was quite unexpected, given that at the time of writing their MA theses, English major students’ proficiency in the language they were about to teach was expected to be higher.

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Lexical problems have already been discussed in detail (in Chapter 8), but they will again be exemplified using problems encountered with some new examples. One example for using misleading synonyms comes from LTH8, where the thesis writer refers to 16–17-year-old participant students using the students, many people, some children as if these were synonyms. It is not that students are not people, but in describing research procedures RA writers do not use such synonyms to avoid their possible interpretation as exophoric reference to people or children other than the participants. However, if RAs do use synonyms, it is only in immediately following sentences with a demonstrative (this, these).

Jegyzet elhelyezéséhez, kérjük, lépj be.!

Demonstratives (including the definite article) misused constituted the last set of items here. Most often the problem (74%) was that either a short distance referring item indicating proximity was used to refer to a preceding section across a section title, thereby violating both the expectation that these demonstratives are used to refer to close items and the criteria for a good paragraph. Or distant reference pointed to an item in the preceding sentence (e.g., that). Long distance cataphoric reference with the definite pronoun was characteristic of low rated theses (18%), where the full form of the referred presupposed item was found several pages ahead of the referring item.
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