now ‘at this time’

then ‘at that time’

here ‘in this place’

there ‘in that place’

Conjunctives or discourse adjuncts are one of the problematic borderline categories for any taxonomy of cohesion. Many conjunctives contain a typical reference item: as a result of this, in this way, based on these […], etc. Halliday and Hasan (1976) deal with all the aspects of cohesion, but they admit that in the case of borderline cases, there is no need to “force a classification”, but analytical decisions should be based on “applicability in practice” (ibid., 76). In this book, the main focus is on reference only, and following a bottom-up approach most of the time; that is, analytical decisions are based on phenomena that can be observe in the academic corpus used. Therefore, when encountering conjunctions with a reference item (such as the ones above), it needs to be examined individually. Now if the presupposed element can be located in the text, it would be very artificial to pretend that it is not there or exclude it from our analysis, and label it ‘conjunction’. While I do agree that if looking at cohesion in a larger framework it is more logical to treat conjunctives as a separate category, in the present analysis it would be illogical to exclude conjunctives from the list of referring items. They, as well as other referring items, need a suitable presupposed element in the text, and if this element is either missing or inappropriate, the chain of reference is broken. Chapter 8 will reveal that these conjunctives are exactly the referring items that novice writers tend to misuse.