Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

Possessive 
determiner 
First
person
Second 
person
Third
person
my
our
your
his
her
its
their
Raw No.
7
110
9
54
32
125
329
Norm. rate
0.08
1.2
0.1
0.6
0.4
1.4
3.6
Table 1-2: Frequency of possessive determiners in the 
Applied Linguistics 
corpus

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As to the rare occurrences of the reader pronoun 
you
, they are used to enhance 
dialogicity and involve the reader in the argumentation. Similarly to 
we
, 
you
is 
semantically indeterminate and in academic discourse may refer to the reader or 
to people in general (including the writer), which is regarded as non-referential 
(cf. Hiddleston and Pullum 2002). It is this ambiguous generalizing use of 
you
that is used almost exclusively in the corpus. A rare sequence of such uses of the 
second person pronoun is illustrated in (3), which is taken from the discussion 
section of a co-authored research article. In this paragraph, the authors use the 
exclusive author-reference 
we
to present their views and state their claims, while 
the second person pronoun you is used to involve the reader in the argumentation 
in the part which provides explanatory reasons supporting the approach suggested. 
The perception of coherence in the extract is construed thanks to the continuity 
of the shared mental representation of the authors established by 
we
and the 
recurrent use of 
you
referring to the reader and people in general, which enhances 
the interpersonal dimension of academic discourse.
(3)
To deal with figurative language generally, our argument focuses on the 
element of ‘untruth’, and the notions of both linguistic and pragmatic 
competence. We believe that an interpretation of metaphor and other 
figurative language is a pragmatic reinterpretation of ‘untruth’ in known 
circumstances (see also ‘metaphorical transfer of meaning’, Goatly 
1997: 96). So when you encounter something which is compositionally an 
‘untruth’, it is your linguistic competence which tells you that what you 
hear or read is actually an ‘untruth’. But it is your pragmatic competence
 
which allows you to reinterpret what you have heard or read.
 In the non-
compositional reading of Jack being ‘hot under the collar’, we claim
 
the compositional untruth that Jack has increased body heat only in his 
neck/collar area is analysed linguistically
 
and proves to be pragmatically 
unlikely in context or to break Gricean principles.
(AL/8 Discussion)
While third person pronouns can have anaphoric and deictic reference, 
their use in academic discourse is typically anaphoric. As the frequency data 
summarized in Table 1-3 indicates, the rate of human-reference third person 
pronouns in academic discourse is not very high. In the corpus they typically 
refer to scholars upon whose research the author draws and tend to occur in 
subject position followed by mental and discourse verbs, such as 
suggest
, 
define
, 
argue
, 
think
. The higher frequency of masculine pronouns can be explained by 
the prevalence of male authors in the reference lists of the articles included in 
my corpus. It should be noted that there are three instances of 
he/she
intended to 
cope with the gender issue.

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