Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

Personal 
pronoun
First person singular
First person plural
Second person
I
me
we
us
you
Raw No.
104
1
404
58
10
Total raw No.
105
462
10
Norm. rate
1.1
5.1
0.1
Table 1-1: Frequency of writer and reader pronouns in the 
Applied Linguistics 
corpus
The cohesive role of writer and reader pronouns is evident in articles where 
these indexicals are used more systematically. While in face-to-face conversation 
the referents of first and second person pronouns shift with the change of turns, in 
written
academic discourse the referents of the participant’s pronouns are fixed – 
the first person pronoun refers to the author, while the second person pronoun 
refers to the reader. Consequently, these pronouns may be interpreted as bearing 
‘anadeictic’ reference, i.e. they combine deictic and anaphoric interpretation, as 
by drawing on contextual clues they identify the writer (or a group including the 
writer in the case of 
we
) or the reader as the referents, and at the same time they 
refer to the shared mental representations of the writer and the reader in the minds 
of the discourse participants, which are established from the very beginning 
of the interaction. Thus in (1) the sequence of five instances of 
I
co-occurring 
with discourse and mental verbs is used in the abstract of a research article to 
represent the author as the agent of the research process and the writer of the 
text; in addition, this cohesive chain is extended by two instances of sentence 
internal ellipsis (
and outline
, 
and argue
). All the occurrences of the personal 
pronoun 
I
have the same referent – the author of the article – which is retrievable 
both from the situational context and anaphorically, as the shared representation 
of the referent is established not only by the first mentioning of the first person 
pronoun in 
I argue
, but also by the name of the author typically appearing under 
the title of the paper and the prepositional phrase 
in this paper
in initial position. 
This prepositional phrase comprising a demonstrative determiner and a discourse 
noun positions the author within the discourse space and has a discourse deictic 
function, i.e. it points to the text as a whole and presupposes the availability 
of the mental representations of the writer and the reader as participants in the 
discourse process mediated by the text. It should be noted
 
that the exclusive 
author-reference pronouns 
I
and 
we
have the potential to create cohesive chains 
which are coherently threaded into the whole text as they refer to one of the 

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main participants in the discourse world shared by the writer and the reader. 
This is evidenced by the fact that most of the occurrences of author pronouns 
are found in abstracts, introductions and conclusions, i.e. in text initial and final 
position, thus assuring the continuity of their referents throughout the article and 
contributing to the perception of coherence at the global level of discourse.
(1)
In this paper, 
I argue that interaction can draw on both interactive 
and interactional resources: interactive resources help to guide the 
reader through the text, while interactional resources involve the reader