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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11. OVERALL CONCLUSIONS
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11.3. Empirical outcome: referential characteristics of research articles and MA theses

11.3. Empirical outcome: referential characteristics of research articles and MA theses

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The empirical aspect of the study, that is, the comparative analysis of RAs and MA theses using this new instrument, revealed new aspects of cohesion relevant for EFL and ESL teachers, and students of EAP. The empirical findings of this study are also relevant for the study of discourse analysis and cohesion analysis. Through a contrastive analysis of Hungarian student writing and English expert writing, this study contributes to research in written discourse analysis and applied linguistics by providing data concerning Hungarian advanced learners’ difficulties using reference as a cohesive device, and by discussing pedagogical implications based on how experts realize functions in writing that seem problematic for Hungarian learners.

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As a result of the referential cohesion analysis of the corpus of 20RAs, 10 high- and 10 low-rated MA theses, some interesting outcomes of the reference analysis (based on normalized data) are highlighted here:
(1) Descriptive linguistic information

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Out of the total number of reference items, RAs had the lowest number of cohesive items (29%), followed by high-rated theses (37%), and low-rated theses with the highest ratio (42%), which means that RAs are lexically denser and rely less on reader inference of cohesive relationships.
(2) Discourse features

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As regards the number of cohesive ties, fewer were found in the MA thesis corpus (avg. 37) than in the RA corpus (avg. 38); though they formed more chains in the theses. This means that MA theses contained more short chains (consisting of 2–5 cohesive ties).

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An in-depth analysis of the presupposed items (or main referents) of the 10 longest chains in RAs, showed that out of the referents of the 8 longest chains in each RA, on average, 6 were already present in the abstract.
(3) Genre-specific information

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The most problematic text part in high-rated MA theses is the Review of the Literature, with the majority of errors due to the lack of presupposed items in the text (in other words, over-reliance on the reader’s familiarity with the literature and the MA thesis research conducted). In low-rated MA theses, it is the Results and Discussion section, with many vague items, problematic demonstratives and lexical items.

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Based on a comparison of extended and new chains it was found that while MA theses have double the space to explain their Methods, and that they have about five times as much space to establish a theoretical background, they do not rely on that background so much in describing the methods as RAs.

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In general, the early introduction of the main referents of a research paper and consistent reference to them establishes long chains of reference with a steadily increasing number of extended chains. MA theses, especially low-rated theses, lack a specific introduction of these referents and have an unexpectedly high number of new chains even in the Conclusions.
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