Stage 1 of this research is a study aimed at checking whether Halliday and Hasan's (1976) analysis provides a reliable measure for cohesive reference. The instrument was validated using both quantitative and qualitative methods on a set of ten abstracts of research articles written by native English-speaking experts in the field of applied linguistics to explore the language areas that may be successfully coded by the taxonomy, and those that are treated ambiguously or vaguely.

 

The analysis of ten RA abstracts strictly followed the coding scheme suggested by Halliday and Hasan (1976). The scheme is based on the notion that cohesive elements need a presupposed item for their interpretation. Proceeding sentence by sentence, we first identified cohesive elements and their corresponding presupposed items, which together formed a cohesive tie. The ties were coded based on the type of the referring element. The three main types, pronominals, demonstratives, and comparatives, are further subdivided in the taxonomy and receive codes. The full system is shown in Table 12.

 

 

For example, in the first abstract in the corpus (see the example below), the pronoun it in the second sentence will be coded 13.6, which means that it is a singular, neuter pronominal functioning as a non-possessive Head in the sentence. It refers to the presupposed item Topical structure analysis (TSA) in the first sentence.

In addition to using the coding scheme in Table 12, for each cohesive item, its direction and the distance separating it from the presupposed element were indicated. This technique was used to help with the identification of longer chains of ties. As for the length of ties, there are immediate ties, where the presupposed item is in the immediately preceding sentence; remote ties, in which case there may be a number of intervening sentences separating the two items; and mediated ties, where a referent can be reached through a number of mediating items that refer to the same entity. In the latter case, it is not the mediating items but the number of intervening sentences that is counted. In terms of the direction in which an item points in the text, it is either anaphoric (pointing to previous text parts) or cataphoric (pointing to subsequent text parts).

 

 

In the coding scheme, the default value is anaphoric; therefore, cataphoric ties will be marked ‘K’. Table 13 shows the coding of the direction and length of ties.

 

The sample analysis in Table 14 shows that this six-sentence abstract contains 2 cohesive ties. The words in bold in Abstract 2 may have a cohesive function here. In sentence 3, it is not cohesive, because its presupposed item text is in the same sentence. In sentence 4, the and same probably function together as one lexical item: in this context, the same way can be paraphrased – with the same meaning – as identically, which shows that it is one unit. While the same way may point to more distant referents, identically usually refers to two items in the same sentence; in this case, this supports the assumption that the same way refers to how text types… cohere, which is in the same sentence, and which means that it does not establish a cohesive tie. What this does in sentence 4 is called extended reference; as Halliday and Hasan put it “the referent clearly is an extended passage of text” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, 67). Here, the reference is the full RA, but it is difficult to decide whether it refers cataphorically to the remaining text after the introduction or to the full text, in which case the title may be taken as the representation of the whole text as its presupposed item. The other item in the same sentence, its, clearly points to conjunction and is not cohesive. In the last sentence, the two demonstratives have the same presupposed item; therefore, following Halliday and Hasan’s method (1976, 332), they count as one tie.