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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5. STAGE 1: HALLIDAY AND HASAN’S COHESION ANALYSIS: THE STARTING POINT
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5.6. Results and discussion
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5.6.2. Cohesive characteristics of abstracts

5.6.2. Cohesive characteristics of abstracts

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The frequency of the types of cohesive reference found in the abstracts is shown in Table 15, where the percentages indicate average numbers for the four analyses (2 analyses by 2 coders) out of the total number of cohesive ties of reference.
 

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Table 15 Frequencies of referential ties 10 RA abstracts
Type of cohesion
Referring item
Coding
%
I.
Pronominals
1
T: 6.9
singular, neuter functioning as non-possessive, as Head
it
13.6
6.5
plural functioning as possessive, as Deictic
their
14.8
0.4
2.
Demonstratives and definite article
2
T: 89.2
(1)
demonstrative, near funct. as nominal, Deictic or Head
this/these
21.6
34.6
demonstrative, near funct. as place adverbial
here
21.7
3.5
(2)
demonstrative, far funct. as nominal, Deictic or Head
that/those
22.6
0.4
demonstrative, far funct. as place adverbial
there
22.7
0.4
demonstrative, far funct. as time adverbial
then
22.8
2.7
(3)
definite article
the
23
47.6
3.
Comparatives (not complete list)
3
T: 3.9
(2)
similarity funct. as deictic
e.g., similar(ly), such
32.6
0.8
(3)
difference funct. as deictic
e.g., different, other, else
33.6
0.4
(4)
comparison, quantity funct. as numerative
e.g., more, less, as many; ordinals
34.7
2.7
Note: In Table 15, T = the total number for each main type, details under each; Coding is according to Halliday and Hasan’s (1976), summarized in Table 12.
 

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The most frequent types of ties are demonstratives (89.2%), with the definite article establishing almost half of the cohesive ties. Only two types of pronouns are present in the text, it contributes 6.5% to the number of ties, their to only 0.4%. This lack of pronouns is a characteristic of academic genres; therefore, this result is not surprising at all. Comparatives were mainly represented by quantifiers in the abstracts.

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The 10 abstracts were, on average, 5.9 sentences long. The distances of ties are difficult to count as the method only allows us to list cohesive ties. Longer chains in this way are extremely difficult to follow; for this, distances need to be counted separately for each presupposed item, which is a messy and confusing procedure. In the abstracts there were on average 21 mediated (2.5/text) and 23 non-mediated (2.6/text) ties, but such analysis is obviously inapplicable in longer texts to reveal patterns of longer chains of reference.
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