Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

Pronoun 
type
Singular
Plural
masculine
feminine
non-human
he
him
she
her
it
ant.-it
they
them
Raw No.
52
7
35
5
369
232
357
97
Total raw No.
59
40
601
454
Norm. rate
0.7
0.4
6.6
5.0
Table 1-3: Frequency of ‘third party’ pronouns in the 
Applied Linguistics 
corpus
The following extract from the literature review section of a research article 
(4) shows a typical example of 
she
, which is related by anaphoric reference to 
Schiffrin 
and thus forms a local cohesive chain. 
(4)
Schiffrin’s (1987) analysis of DMs is based on a theory of discourse 
coherence. 
She
 defines DMs as ‘sequentially dependent elements which 
bracket units of talk’ (Schiffrin 1987: 31).
(AL/10 Discussion)
The notable frequency of the non-human pronoun is to a large extent due to 
the significant frequency of anticipatory-
it
structures (232 occurrences), such as 
it is difficult to
, 
it is important to
, which are emblematic of academic discourse. 
The subject in these structures is considered semantically empty and the use of 
it
is regarded as “not anaphoric (or at least not clearly so)” (Huddleston and Pullum 
2002: 1481). In academic discourse, however, the views expressed by the 
it
-
clause are typically attributed to the author of the text as the source of knowledge 
and opinion conveyed by the discourse (occasionally, the contextually retrievable 
source of opinion expressed in 
it
-clauses might be attributed to other researchers). 
The rhetorical motivations for the selection of 
it
-clauses instead of their personal 
counterparts (
It is argued
vs. 
I/we argue
) is their potential to encode evaluation
,
while presenting the opinion expressed as objective, as if distanced from the 
writer, and thus less open to negotiation (Martin, Matthiessen and Painter 1997, 
Hunston and Sinclair 2000, Hewings and Hewings 2002). Nevertheless, since the 
opinion expressed is attributed to the writer, 
it
-clauses may be seen as performing 
an interpersonal function since they contribute to the construal of the authorial 
voice of the writer and thus enhance the perception of discourse coherence based 
on the continuity of the mental representation of this discourse participant.
The anaphoric use of 
it
is rather frequent; the typical referents of the non-
human pronoun are objects of research or research tools. While similarly to 
he
and 
she
the non-human pronoun forms local cohesive 
chains, it differs from the 
human-reference pronouns in its potential to create longer cohesive chains, as 
in (5):

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(5)
Although this task is not very natural, 
its
 highly controlled nature means 
that it
 produces data which are easy to quantify and analyse. Furthermore, 
as it
 can be administered to more than one student at a time, there is 
less chance that the results will be biased by participants discussing the 
task with each other between sessions. This makes 
it
 a suitable task to 
administer to a large group of participants.
(AL/3 Method)
The plural personal pronoun 
they
may have both human and non-human 
referents, which explains its relatively high frequency. The most frequent human 
referents of 
they
are researchers whose work is cited in the article of participants 
in tests and experiments, as illustrated in (6) and (7), while the most frequent 
non-human referents of 
they
are linguistic structures and phenomena. The local 
cohesive chain based on anaphoric reference may comprise several members, as 
in (6), where there are two instances of anaphoric 
they
, and in (7), where there 
are three instances of the plural third person pronoun.
(6)
The concrete picture description task used was an adaptation of that 
used by Poulisse (1990). In Poulisse’s test, participants were shown 
photographs of, mostly, household objects. They were asked to look at 
the photographs one by one and to make clear in English what object 
they saw, either by naming it, or in any other way. They were asked to 
do this in such a way that an English speaker, who would later listen to 
the recordings of the session, would be able to identify the objects.
(AL/3 
Method)
(7)
Given that lexical bundles are defined strictly on the basis of frequency, 
with no consideration of structural or functional criteria, 
they might 
be expected to be arbitrary strings of words that have no linguistic 
status. Instead, these frequent sequences of words turn out to be readily 
interpretable in both structural and functional terms. Although 
they are 
not the kinds of grammatical structures recognized by traditional linguistic 
theory, most lexical bundles do have well-defined structural correlates: 
they
 usually consist of the beginning of a clause or phrase plus the first 
word of an embedded structure (e.g. a dependent complement clause or a 
prepositional phrase).
(AL/7 Conclusions)
As the above analysis shows, in academic discourse writer and reader 
pronouns which tend to have anadeictic interpretation enhance the perception of 
coherence at the global level of discourse, while human and non-human reference 
third person pronouns create anaphorical cohesive relations which give rise to 
local cohesive chains, thus contributing to coherent discourse organization at the 
level of individual paragraphs.

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