Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

particular individuals.
The relatively frequent use of the resultive/inferential conjuncts 
then
(0.50) 
and 
so
(0.25) in the NSC corpus is not surprising at all, since these conjuncts 
are considered rather informal and typical in particular of conversation (Biber et 
al. 1999: 886); thus their common application in the NSC in my material gives 
further evidence of a more informal and dialogic way of expression typically 
connected with English academic texts written by native speakers. Nevertheless, 
these two conjuncts also occur in the NNSC; the conjunct 
then
when used in 
the correlative pair with 
if
in the NSC is illustrated in Example (11), while the 
conjunct 
so
when used in combination with the coordinating conjunction 
and
is 
shown in Examples (2), (6) and (8) above.
As regards the rather formal conjunct 
hence
(0.05-0.07), it is not much 
represented in either corpus; this result is in accordance with Biber et al. (1999: 
887), who state that 
hence
is used only in one fifth of all academic texts (cf. 
Table 2-4 above).
(11) NSC, Text 10
A contrastive frequency of ±0.14 was chosen as the cut-off point for 
the three categories: if the contrastive frequency is ţ0.15 or above, the 
representation is regarded as more frequent. If the contrastive frequency is 
–0.15 or below, 
then
 the representation is regarded as less frequent. Since 
there is no occurrence of cos in the student data, it can be categorized 
in the ‘less frequent’ column, although its contrastive frequency is only 
–0.14. 
Hence
, it was decided that if the figure falls within the range 
between –0.14 and ţ0.14, the representation of DMs is regarded as 
comparable. A positive difference in contrastive frequency means the DM 
is used more frequently in the student data; whereas a negative difference 

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in contrastive frequency means it is used less frequently in the student 
data. Table 4 presents DMs which are more frequent and less frequent 
and those that are of comparable use among the 49 Form 6 Hong Kong 
students.