Variability of Cohesive Devices Across Registers

Abstract

As throughout our lives we deal with a great variety of texts and discourses, we intuitively know what lexical and syntactical patterns we should use when we want to produce discourse appropriate to certain situations. Text producers and recipients also feel that in some cases they are free to choose from a variety of linguistic means to express their communicative purposes, while in others there are strict regulations imposed on what lexis and syntactical structures to use. Thus, the paper aims to investigate frequency and distribution of cohesive devices across registers. Three texts belonging to different registers were analysed: a legal text is considered as a sample of a restricted register, a short story belongs to an open-ended register, while a newspaper article could be placed somewhere in the middle of this continuum. The major groups of cohesive devices were taken into consideration: lexical cohesive ties, referential cohesive devices, ellipsis / substitution cohesive ties, and discourse markers taken together with conjunction. The results obtained prove that lexical cohesive devices, being members of open systems, prevail in the texts belonging to different registers. Distribution of different types of cohesive devices within the general framework is, however, influenced by register. Closed registers give preference to lexical cohesion at the expense of reference, ellipsis and substitution.