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


Appendix E – The role of numerals in reference

Going from sentence 74 to 70 in the interpretation of this text segment, we first encounter the referring item the three drafts. While the definiteness of the phrase is partially provided by the possessive structure (of a section…), looking merely at sentence 74 will not explain why three? why not all the drafts?. If one starts looking for the anaphor in the previous sentences, they first encounter three versions as a possible candidate; still, sentence 72 does not specify the versions of what? are being talked about. Moving on to sentence 71, one can see that 71 contains drafts, which readers will probably all understand as a synonym of versions and as a repetition of drafts in 74, but without stopping at three versions, it would not be possible to interpret the three in the definite phrase in 74. There is only one further step to be taken. There needs to be a full form for the abbreviation in 71 for us to recover the full referent, which can be constructed from sentence 70: several drafts of Literature Review texts. This means that to arrive at the full referent of the three drafts a mediating item was needed and the inclusion of two more sentences.

Referential Cohesion in Academic Writing

Tartalomjegyzék


Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2024

ISBN: 978 963 664 049 1

This monograph aims to contribute to the study of written discourse and to writing pedagogy within the field of teaching English for academic purposes. The study has both a theoretical and an empirical focus. Due to the lack of an analytical tool available for the reliable cohesive reference analysis of extended texts, to explore the patterns of referential cohesion in research papers, it has been necessary to develop a new analytical tool. In practice, the study advances the theory of cohesion analysis by refining the cohesive reference-related aspects of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy of cohesion to transform it into a reliable and valid analytical tool for cohesive reference analysis in academic discourse in particular. The analytical tool is then applied to present a corpus-based comparative analysis of research articles and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) writers’ MA theses. This is accomplished by a multi-stage investigation, using quantitative and qualitative approaches at every stage to ensure that quantitative data is supported by qualitative insights and vice versa. The present empirical study points out considerable differences regarding the cohesive reference patterns among research articles produced by expert writers and the subcorpora of high- and low-rated theses by novice EFL writers. A major outcome of the investigation is that it yields significant pedagogical implications for both teachers and learners of academic writing: provides clues for the design of tasks for the development of the relevant aspects of EFL discourse competence together with additional practical activities for a variety of applications of the theory-based analytical tool.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/jenei-referential-cohesion-in-academic-writing//

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