Introducing English Linguistics

Democratic presidential hopefuls
sparred genially last night on details
of 
the Iraq war, healthcare, and guns, but they stood resolutely united in
blaming President Bush for getting the country into 
the war and in
agreeing on the need to end 
it.
In the first national debate of the 2008 presidential season, the eight
contenders
all denounced 
the war, with two of the group – former sena-
tor John Edwards of North Carolina and Senator Christopher Dodd of
Connecticut – acknowledging outright that their 2002 votes to authorize
the war were the biggest professional mistakes of their lives.
(Milligan 2007)
The excerpt opens with the introduction of two items of new information –
Democratic presidential hopefuls and  the Iraq war – that each begin what
Halliday and Hasan (1985: 84) refer to as a cohesive chain: a series of expres-
sions all related to each other. Democratic presidential hopefuls are first
referred to by the referential pronoun they (“they stood resolutely”) and sub-
sequently by two instances of Lexical Cohesion: the synonymous expres-
sion the eight contenders and the more general expression the group. The Iraq
war is first referred to with the more general expression the war, which is
followed a few words later by the referential pronoun it, and then at the
start of the second paragraph by the repetition of the expression the war.
Personal pronouns will be used when it is clear in the context exactly
what is being referred to: it refers clearly back to the war because there is
no intervening noun that it could refer to. However, as a text progresses,
and more nouns are introduced, it becomes necessary to either repeat an
expression or use a synonym or more general expression. Thus, in the sec-
ond paragraph Democratic presidential hopefuls are referred to as the eight con-
tenders. Using a synonymous expression such as this both preserves clarity
and provides for variety of expression; that is, it avoids both ambiguity
and potentially undesirable repetition.

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