Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

6.6 Results: Transitional conjuncts
Although transitional conjuncts (cf. Table 2-6) can be further subdivided into 
discoursal and temporal, they are not much represented in my material. Both 
subgroups mark the insertion of information that does not follow directly from 
the previous discourse. The former indicate a shift in attention to a different or 
only loosely related topic, or to a temporally connected event, as the application 
of 
now
in Example (5) above and in Example (17) below indicate. Although Quirk 
et al. (1985: 636) consider the discoursal conjunct 
now
to be rather informal, the 
examples included in this chapter prove that despite its assumed informality, it 
can appear even in the formal genre of RAs. The latter, temporal, subgroup of 
transitional conjuncts, represented by 
initially, meanwhile
and 
by the way
, each 
having only one occurrence in the NSC in my data, seek to signal either a move 
away from the normal sequence in discourse (ibid.: 640), or a subsequent step, as 
is the case of the temporal conjunct 
initially
in Example (18) below.

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