Page 299 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

COHESION ANDCOHERENCE 285
icans do not care about politics. In my country, people think that they are powerless to control the political system, and they don't care about politics ei- ther. So, American researchers have been studying the tendency that many people do not even go to vote.
Lexical ties: trend—tendency
On the whole, the number of enumerative nouns in English probably does not exceed a hundred, and learning them is well worth the time and effort be- cause of the breadth of their meanings and their flexible contextual uses.
1 DEMONSTRATIVE PRONOUNS
Demonstrative pronouns such as this, that, these, and those are also a promi- nent feature of cohesive discourse. For instance, Excerpt (2) showed how demonstratives can be used effectively to connect nouns and ideas across sentences.
Similar to articles or possessive pronouns, demonstrative pronouns be- long in the class of determiners and play a prominent role in text cohesion. Demonstratives have referential functions in written English (Halliday & Hasan, 1976)—they point to particular objects or events discussed in earlier text. Quirk et al. (1985) identified several functions of demonstratives in discourse and pointed out that these pronouns are often ambiguous in their referential and determinative properties. Because demonstrative pronouns are relatively easy to use, L2 writers frequently employ too many of them in their writing (Hinkel, 2001a, 2002a).
In addition, in various languages such as Chinese, Japanese, or Viet- namese, the uses of demonstratives can be a great deal more elaborate than they are in English (Levinson, 1983; Palmer, 1994; Watanabe, 1993). Earlier studies have determined that L2 writers frequently transfer the meanings of demonstratives from their Lls and may attribute to these markers more referential implications than they actually have in English (McCarthy, 1991). For this reason, the limitations of demonstratives as a cohesive and "pointing" device need to be addressed in teaching (see chap. 6 for teaching suggestions).
PHRASE-LEVEL CONJUNCTIONS
AND THE LAWS OF PARALLEL STRUCTURE
Officially, the function of conjunctions is to mark connections between ideas in discourse and text, and conjunctions are the most ubiquitous and proba-
1
The uses of demonstratives and the pitfalls associated with their overuses in student text
are discussed in detail in chapter 6. For this reason, the mention of demonstratives here serves merely as a reminder of their important cohesive function.
TLFeBOOK