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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6. STAGE 2: DEVELOPING A NOVEL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF COHESIVE REFERENCE
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6.6. Results and discussion
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6.6.2. The distribution of referring items, cohesive ties and cohesive chains

6.6.2. The distribution of referring items, cohesive ties and cohesive chains

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The 10 RAs analyzed contained 232.4 sentences on average, and 188 cohesive ties. This means that almost every sentence was connected to another by a referring expression. Out of the total number of referring expressions 35% were used cohesively, which means that the remaining 65% had their referent within the same sentence. The high ratio of specification of the referent within the same sentence probably helps in decreasing the cognitive workload for the reader when processing the text: understanding the highly informative research article is easier if the short-term memory is not loaded with an unnecessary number of referents carried on for comprehension.
 

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Table 18 The distribution of referring items, cohesive ties and cohesive chains
Cohesive ties and chains in 10 RAs
Total number of sentences
2324
Total number of cohesive chains (average/RA)
69
Total number of words
66,277
Total number of cohesive ties (average/RA)
188
The percentage of cohesively used referring items in the corpus
35%
Total number of cohesive chains containing more than two cohesive ties
40% of total chains
 

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Table 18 shows that 40% of the cohesive chains consisted of more than two cohesive ties, meaning that they contributed to the global cohesion of the text; while the remaining 60% established local, inter-sentential relationships. Again, this high ratio of short-distance references may be genre-specific: long-distance references are more difficult to track and might make the RA less comprehensible.

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Interestingly, the definite article – which made up 56% of the total number of cohesive items – was the only referring item that was used for long-distance reference (where the presupposed item is not in the immediately preceding sentence but forms a non-mediated tie with an item earlier in the text). The definite article was also unique among demonstratives in taking part in cataphoric (forward pointing) reference. The demonstrative this, second in frequency in the corpus, was only used for referring to something in the immediately preceding sentence (this is also true of its plural form), the only exception being this study, this research. Figure 10 shows the frequency of the occurrences of the cohesive items. The most interesting finding shown in Figure 10 is that out of the personal pronouns only the plural (they, their) and the neutral (it, its) were used cohesively.
 

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Figure 10 Frequencies of cohesively used referring items in the 10 analyzed RAs
 

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Other pronominals, even those non-cohesively used were rare in the corpus. The demonstratives that do not appear in Figure 10, that, those, there, were often used in the RAs, but almost always non-cohesively. Comparatives were rare, and they were only used for short distance reference.
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