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Û

539 Glossary for any unfamiliar terms

Grammar across turns and sentences | 263

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In the following extract, the first sentence in the paragraph flags what the

whole paragraph will be about (forming a friendship with one’s dictionary) and

sets the syntactic framework (the initial modal adjuncts in bold) for the

subsequent sentences:

[new paragraph in the introduction text to a learners’ dictionary of English]

Maybe people see their dictionary as a friend

. 

Perhaps a bond is created in all

the hours that a learner spends together with a dictionary. 

Perhaps some of the

character of the book rubs off on the reader. 

Wh

-cleft structures and similar foregrounding structures (

Û

475d, 475

) may signal

that the sentence in which they occur is a key sentence in the paragraph:

[UFO = unidentified flying object]

Of course many pitfalls may lie in wait at this point of the research. But it is

possible, with caution, to isolate categories of UFO with general

characteristics. An example of one category of UFO, which some researchers

have pinpointed, is of objects with an ovoid shape from 1 to 3 metres in

diameter, which rotate on a vertical axis, close to the ground, and which

appear to emit a wide range of electromagnetic radiation. Perhaps 

what is most

important is that the nature of such identifiable UFO categories, and the

conditions under which they might be observed, are predictable, after careful

analysis of the data. Scientific searches, with appropriate instrumentation, are

now able to prove once and for all that these UFOs do exist, and can provide

information about their nature. To distinguish such phenomena from more

dubious data, we propose that they should be renamed ‘UAPs’, for unidentified

atmospheric phenomena, as this seems to be an appropriate and adequate

description. 

What is lacking at this stage is for some imaginative research laboratory or

university department to contact serious UFO researchers and design an

experimental study for these UAPs. In the US, Harley Rutledge, head of the

physics department at Southcast Missouri State University, has conducted a

pilot study, with some encouraging results.

Cohesive ties may operate across paragraph boundaries as well as sentence

boundaries, especially determiners, comparative expressions and linking adjuncts:

[from a book discussing different types of language-teaching material]

With international materials it is obvious that the needs of 

individual students

and teachers

, as well as the expectations of