Cohesion in written business discourse: Some contrasts

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine whether “constellations” (White 1975) of cohesive items occur in three types of applied and academic written discourse: letters, reports and textbooks. Twenty complete letters, and randomly selected pages from annual reports and ten business and economics textbooks were coded for cohesive elements using the Halliday and Hasan scheme (1976:333–339). Results show that Lexical Cohesion is the most common category in all three discourse types (letters 46%, reports 79%, and textbooks 79%) but that the occurrence of lexical subcategories (e.g., synonym, same item) varies among discourse types. Reference is the second most common category (letters 42%, reports 14%, and textbooks 11%); again, differences appear in the subcategories. Conjunction represents less than 10% of the items in any discourse type; in letters and reports a large number of conjunction subtype categories (e.g., additives, adversatives, causals) appear; whereas in letters, the additive AND predominates. It is concluded that although generalizations cannot be made about cohesive features in the broad classes of applied and academic EBE discourse, constellations of cohesive elements can be identified in each letter type as well as in reports and textbooks. Suggestions are made for curriculum preparation and further study.