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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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