Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

5 Results and discussion
5.1 Personal pronouns, cohesion and coherence
As previous research has shown, the overall frequency of personal pronouns 
in academic discourse is lower than in most other types of written prose (Biber et 
al. 1999). This is due to a large extent to the general tendency towards clarity and 
explicitness in academic writing in accordance with which reiteration is often 
preferred to pronominal referencing. In addition, the lower frequency of pronouns 
with human reference may be seen as reflecting the traditional assumption that 
academic research is purely empirical and objective (e.g. Swales 1990, 2004, 
Hyland 2001, Harwood 2005), in agreement with which most academic style 
manuals recommend the avoidance of reference to human agency in academic 
prose (Bennett 2009, Flowerdew forthcoming). However, recent research has 
shown that especially in the soft sciences “contrary to advice given in some 
style guides to maintain an objective, impersonal style, the pronoun system 
is ex ploited by writers of RAs [research articles] for maintaining the writer-
reader relationship and allowing the writer an authorial voice” (Flowerdew
forthcoming). The main functions of author-reference personal pronouns have 
been found to show the writer’s attitude to disciplinary prac tices and disciplinary 
knowledge (Ivanič 1998, Hyland 2005), high light key problems, emphasize the 
author’s contribution to the field (filling a gap) and seek agreement for it (Kuo 
1999), and organize the text for the reader (Harwood 2005).
As the results of a quantitative analysis of writer and reader pronouns in the 
material (Table 1-1) show, the frequency of first person pronouns is considerably 
higher than that of second person pronouns, and the rate of plural first person 
pronouns exceeds by far the rate of single author-pronouns. This generally 
concurs with Biber et al.’s (1999) findings (2.5 for 
I/me
, 3.5 for 
we/us
and 1.0 for 
you
), although in my corpus the rates of 
I
and 
you
are lower, and the rate of 
we
higher. This divergence might be explained by the composition of the corpora: in 
comparison with Biber et al.’s large corpus, which comprises texts representing 
various academic disciplines, the corpus used in the present study is discipline-
specific and includes a substantial proportion of co-authored articles (50%). 
The high frequency of 
we
reflects the potential of its shifting signifier which 
may have “many potential scopes of reference even within a single discourse” 
(Wales 1996: 62). The very low rate of 
you
indicates that while using different 
devices to construct dialogism between themselves and their audience, the 
authors only rarely employ direct address to the reader. It should be noted that 

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there is considerable variation in the use of writer and reader pronouns across 
the different articles. It is assumed, however, that together with other author-
reference devices, such as text and research nouns and 
it
-clause structures, they 
contribute to the construal of continuous authorial presence and thus to discourse 
coherence.