LEXICAL RELATIONS
7.3 A taxonomy of non-cohesive reference in academic writing
So far we have been working with the assumption that referring items may be non-cohesive for two main reasons: their referent can be found within the same sentence or they refer exophorically to something outside of the text. In the results of Stage 2 we have already pointed to the fact that further specification of non-cohesive uses of referring items might improve the reliability of the analysis. Although the focus of Stage 2 was the representation of cohesive chains, in the course of the analysis I found it useful to label the items that were not cohesive with explanatory notes on why they did not establish a cohesive tie. For this Stage 3 of the research, we have collected these notes from the previous analysis and, based on their similarities, derived the five main headings below:
A: Sentence-internal
B: Specified by pre- or post-modifier C: Exophoric
D: Non-referential E: Non-integral
These five main categories reflect the functions that non-cohesive items have, or they indicate where the presupposed item is to be found if not in the surrounding text outside of the containing sentence. In this section, we will discuss the content of these categories according to the order in which they appear in Table 19.
(In Table 19 the list is not exhaustive, the listed phenomena are ordered neither according to the importance nor frequency of occurrence in the corpus; nevertheless, all the types of items listed occur in the corpus and would have been problematic if only relying on the sample analysis and procedures provided by Halliday and Hasan (1976).
In the examples in Table 19, presupposed items are underlined, referring items are in bold.)
152
As noun phrases tend to be very complex, particulary in academic writing, it is not surprising to find several layers of embedding. “The complexity of phrases in academic prose and news reportage reflects the higher lexical density in these registers (2.2.9), which is associated with a greater potential for the formation of complex phrases (usually built up around lexical words; 2.7)” (Biber et al., 1991, p. 117). In the analysis of these complex noun phrases the referring item that needs to be specified is analyzed as one that is specified by the closest phrase that immediately follows or precedes it (i.e. usually the complement that will be under the same node in a phrase structure tree).
153
Table 19. A taxonomy of non-cohesive reference items
154
(A) SENTENCE-INTERNAL: In this first category in Table 19 we listed (A1-A3) all those items that appear in the Referential Cohesion Analysis (i.e. personal, demonstrative, comparative reference), but whose presupposed items are in the same sentence.
Presupposed items:
Swales the participants he
sentence 2 the author the students
they their replies
sentence 3 he the students
Figure 12. Sentence-internal reference
In Figure 12 rows represent sentences (from RA12); blue arrows represent cohesive ties between referring expressions and presupposed items. Expressions with grey arrows show items that are less specific according to Biber et al.’s (1991, p. 234) degrees of reference (see Table 3), and point to a more specific item in the same sentence. In deciding whether or not an item has a presupposed item in the same sentence, we can generally assume that any item that contains a lexically related NP is higher up the scale than the pronouns in the same sentence.
s. 121 The class was not streamed for English and included learners of all abilities, but not learners with special educational needs .
s. 122 The participants were in their fourth year of studying English (3 50 minutes per week) and in their second year of another foreign language . (RA10)
Only in the lack of such an NP (that is, without the participants), will pronouns establish cohesive ties, as in:
s. 137 The stories did not favour girls’ or boys’ preferred narrative styles…
s. 138 They were written to… (RA10)
155
The remaining categories (A4-6) are also similar in that the specification for an item is in the same sentence. Reflexive pronouns “mark identity with a preceding noun phrase” (Biber et al., 1991, p. 70), and usually refer to an entity in the same sentence;
that is, they are only grammatically cohesive: e.g. s. 56 […] only a portion of the graphic material itself (RA9). Specification of the presupposed item sometimes occurs in brackets in the same sentence; e.g. s. 160 […] when they [students] go onto the following unit (RA15) or immediately after the definite NP e.g.: s. 301 It also revealed a dual meaning of the term human (RA15).
(B) SPECIFIED BY PRE- OR POST-MODIFIER: The meaning of the referring item in this category (most commonly a definite article, occasionally a pronoun or a determiner) is specified by a pre- or post-modifier, or a combination of post-modifiers. Although a prepositional phrase following a noun may be its complement or an adverbial, if it is a complement, it usually specifies the reference of the referring item. In possessive constructions (B1) the definite article is almost never cohesive (e.g. the predictions below), only the definite possessor NP (the SBF) establishes a cohesive tie with its full form in sentence 4:
s. 4 Studies based on Gernsbacher’s Structure Building Framework (SBF) show that reading comprehension draws on general, modal cognitive processes.
s. 7 Results corresponded to the predictions of the SBF.
(RA10)
If the first definite is cohesive in a construction, it is usually also indicated by a modifier. It is very rare, that the possessed refers, but it happens:
s. 32 From 1998 until 2002 a similar framework of occupational standards was developed; however, these differed […]
…
s. 34 Nor did the re-structuring of the profession in Scotland based on the report of the McCrone Committee (SEED, 2001) introduce performance related pay.
(RA5)
Likewise, the possessed is usually cohesive with a demonstrative pronoun:
156
s. 138 The narratives were written to the lexical and syntactic level of the LowInt group.
s. 139 The French versions maintained this simple level of lexis and syntax.
(The examples above are based on RA10, but some sentences slightly altered to illustrate the phenomena discussed.)
The meaning of a definite noun phrase can be specified by prepositional phrases (B1) other than the possessive, but it will remain non-cohesive:
e.g. s. 63 In contrast to the clear separation between LI and typically developing children on NWR, there was significant overlap … (RA5)
Adjectival pre-modifiers and participial adjectives as pre-modifiers (B2) function similarly to relative clauses in describing or classifying the entity denoted by the head noun (Biber et al., 1991, p. 97). If the noun phrase contains a pre-modifier, it is usually helpful to paraphrase it to see that it is not cohesive:
(vii) ... the analyzed corpus ... the corpus that was analyzed
Participial adjectives (e.g. interesting, lasting) as pre-modifiers can often be paraphrased by “a relative clause of the form ‘who/which be + verb-ing’ or ‘who/which verb(s/ed)’” (Biber et al., 1991, p. 68). This test shows two important things: one is that these participial adjectives are not to be confused with nominal pre-modifiers, the other is that they have the property of being able to specify the reference of the subsequent noun phrase – as would be the case if they were presented in the form of a relative clause. For these reasons, nouns specified by a pre-modifying participial adjective are very likely to be non-cohesive.
If the meaning of the definite noun phrase is specified within the same sentence by a relative clause (B3) then neither the definite article, nor the relative are cohesive.
157
s.131 The materials that participants would read were versions of the same narratives in English and French, with most containing different sorts of anomalies.
(RA10)
A relative clause is “characteristically a post-modifier in a noun phrase” (Biber, et al., 1991, p. 195). The “relativizer” (a wh-word, or that) points back to the head of the noun phrase to establish the reference of the noun phrase, instead of giving only additional information as in non-restrictive (or non-defining) relative clauses. For this reason, definite nouns followed by a restrictive relative clause will usually be non-referential. In the same way as nouns, pronouns may also refer forward to relative clauses, as in, for example: He who must not be named.
Besides the that-clauses functioning as complements the head noun can also be followed by infinitive clauses which complete the meaning of the noun (Biber et al., 1991, p. 97).
s. 144 Due to multiple analyzes of variance and the need to control for Type I error, the alpha level selected for testing was set at .01. (RA1)
Such infinitive clauses with possessive pronouns specify the meaning of the noun only, while retaining cohesive reference to the person/people referred to, as in:
s. 11…their inability to accurately and fluently identify printed words… (RA1) (C) EXOPHORIC REFERENCE in RAs occurred when the referring item was used with a noun or noun phrase that referred some general entity, or the item pointed to some entity that was not explicitly mentioned earlier in the text because it was unnecessary for some reason. We have already seen exophoric reference is where most ambiguities in reference occur and it is not easy to decide whether a presupposed element in the text is necessary for the identification of the real world referent or not.
On the basis of the analysis of the 10 research articles, we have come to the following decisions about such dubious items. There is a great number of definite nouns that have
158
a general meaning (C1-2), but to be more specific, we can distinguish between two main types.
First, if the noun has generic reference (C1) “it refers to a whole class rather than to an individual person or thing” (Biber et al., 1991, p. 265), and in this case, the definite article is not cohesive. While with an uncountable noun there are a variety of ways to express generic reference, with countable nouns there a fewer options. Either the plural form with zero article may be used (e.g. Dolphins are intelligent animals.) or the singular form with an indefinite or a definite article is used: e.g.: The / A good language learner has efficient learning strategies (Biber et al., 1991). A simple test to check whether a singular countable noun has generic reference is to replace the article preceding it with any. If it does not change the meaning or the reference of the noun, most probably it has generic reference. Note that the definite article with the plural form is only used for generic reference with nationality words (e.g. the Americans) (Biber et al., 1991, p. 266).
However, not all definite nouns with a generic reference are so easy to identify.
Sometimes the full meaning of an item is clear, but not from any specific presupposed item, nor is it general. Our second type of general reference includes those items that get their full interpretations from the textual context (C2). It is illustrated in s. 121 from RA7 where the secondary sector in itself would not tell us if it is the secondary sector of the economy or industrial sector or something else. It is not generic, it does not mean any sector, but we do not need a specific presupposed item either.
s. 121 There were 18 teachers from the secondary sector (three specialists in SEN) and 16 teachers from primary schools. (RA7)
159
It is from both the immediate textual context teachers, primary schools and the topic of the paper that we know that it is the secondary sector of education that is referred to.
Therefore, this item does not need a cohesive link to be interpreted.
Proper names (C3), - such as organizations, countries, tests, examinations, etc.
- containing a definite article – are only cohesive it they are abbreviated as in the example from RA 10 above: Structure Building Framework ← the SBF; but not when the full form is repeated.
Time or place adverbs (C4) are also exophoric if they point to the circumstances outside the text; for example: s. 111 In the 2005-6 academic year, 407 students (15 classes) were assigned to one of four bands … (RA6)
The last type of exophoric items that we have found include items that do not need a presupposed item, because they have one unique referent (C5), and their meaning will be understood without any explicit antecedent, for example: the sun, the world, the Queen of the United Kingdom.
(D) NON-REFERENTIAL: Some items in our analysis are not cohesive simply because they are not referential either. Their presence is due to either grammatical constraints (for examples, see: D3-5) or to the fact that they are part of a multi-word lexical item or an idiomatic expression (D1). Examples for the latter are: out of the blue, all over the place, etc.
Linking words (D2) frequently contain demonstratives or the definite article, and but they are not always referential (e.g.: subordinator: that; complex subordinators:
such that, supposing (that), in that, given (that), etc.). Special structures, such as comparatives with the definite article also belong here (e.g.: The longer you keep this wine, the better it tastes.)Those conjunctions that contain a referring item were regarded cohesive if the answer for the question concerning its reference was found in the text:
160
s. 113 The alternate hypothesis is that performance on these tasks is influenced by experience in another language. In this case, performance on the two experimental tasks will separate the typical EO group from both the BI and LI groups. (In what case? If we consider the alternate hypothesis is true that performance ...) (RA5)
Endophorics (Hyland, 2000, p. 113) are also regarded referential here (e.g. this study, this paper, here, in this research), as they refer to textual features and not to abstract logical relationships. Endophorics are part of the “metatext” (Swales, 2004, p.
121; “textual metadiscourse” in Hyland, 2000, p. 116) which contains text segments that refer to the organization of the whole paper. When speaking about the metatext, the scope of its reference can be the whole paper, a chapter, a section, a paragraph, or a sentence in it.
The dummy it (D3) as subject, or object is non-referential, as it is semantically empty. In everyday language use it is frequently used in subject position when speaking about the weather, the time, or about distance (Biber et al., 1991, p. 125). In academic writing the dummy subject it is frequent in cleft sentences or as an anticipatory subject.
Extraposition or anticipatory it: the dummy it is frequently used in to anticipate a finite or non-finite clause, for example:
in subject position: It was hard to believe [that he had become this savage with the bare knife.]
in object position: We leave it to the reader [to appreciate what this will mean in due course].
(Examples from: Biber et al., 1991, p. 155)
Clefting: it-clefts “are used to bring particular elements of the structure into focus” (Biber et al., 1991, p. 155), for example: It was a new stool that I was trying to get, but I bought an armchair.
Besides the dummy it, the existential there (D4) is also a frequent non-referential item. Biber et al. (1991, p. 154) use the term “anticipatory subject” for the
161
“existential there in subject position”. They describe the function of this construction as one that can postpone the introduction of new information in order to “prepare the addressee” (ibid., p. 154) for it, without using a structure other than the normal subject-verb sequence.
NON-INTEGRAL (E) reference items represent a very practical category necessitated by the actual application of the analytical tool. When we count the total number of items, it is inevitable that we account for items that just happen to be there, but do not form an integral part of the text (hence the name). These may take the form of examples (E1), such as quotations from other texts, or examples from the data (such as most of the sentences in italics in this paper). While these items may be referred to, they do not point to anywhere in the text, they are merely illustrations. The same can be said about tables, figures and diagrams (E2); when these illustrations are referred to in the text, their titles will represent them as presupposed elements in the analysis.