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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3. A THEORETICAL BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY OF REFERENCE
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3.3. A taxonomy of cohesive reference

3.3. A taxonomy of cohesive reference

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What the present purpose of analyzing reference requires is a taxonomy of a closed set of reference items that are frequent and relevant in academic writing. Table 8 summarizes the final list of reference items from the discussion in this chapter. For this the study draw on Halliday and Hasan’s original taxonomy (1976), Biber et al.’s (1991) findings related to reference items in academic writing, and data from our present RA corpus. From now on, the list of cohesive reference items in Table 8 will be used for the Referential Cohesion Analysis (RCA) conducted in this study.
 

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Table 8 Cohesive reference
COHESIVE REFERENCE TYPE
REFERENCE ITEMS
Personal reference
3rd person pronouns
nominative
he, she, it, they
accusative
him, her, it, them
possessive
his, hers, its, theirs
Possessive determiners
his, her, its, their
+NP
Demonstrative reference
Adverbials of place and time
here, there, then
Central determiners
Definite article
the + NP
Demonstrative determiners
this, that +NP
these, those +NP
Comparative reference
Pre- and post-determiners
(functioning with
central determiners)
Quantifiers
inclusive
all, both, each, every +NP
expressing quantity
many, more, most, some, little, less, few, several +NP
arbitrary member
either, neither +NP
Semi-determiners
same, other, former, latter, last, next +NP
certain, such +NP
Adjectives and adverbs of comparison
different(ly),
similar(ly),
as, so
 

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In Table 8, the majority of reference items need a noun phrase for the referential link to be established between sentences. This noun obviously needs to signal identity or relatedness to the presupposed item, which, on the one hand, brings us back to the cline of reference (from most to least specific), and on the other, it calls for a better description of expressing the identity of reference. The most straightforward solution for the latter is to draw on concepts from lexical cohesion analysis to clarify the types of relatedness between lexical items accompanying reference items. Determiners are function words used to narrow or specify the reference of a noun phrase (Biber et al., 1991). Biber et al. use the term indirect anaphoric reference for those cases where the connection between the anaphoric expression and the referent is signaled not by the exact repetition of the noun, but by a related lexical item. Their examples suggest that the relationships they assume as a semantic relationship between the first and the subsequent mention include hyponymy, meronymy, synonymy and antonymy.
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