On the use of demonstrative pronouns and determiners as cohesive devices: A focus on sentence-initial this/these in academic prose

A key concern for writers is the creation of cohesion in a text, and writers are told by style manuals to avoid the use of demonstratives (this, that, these, those) as pronouns in order to maintain cohesion. However, previous corpus-based investigations have already revealed that authors of academic texts use demonstratives as both determiners and pronouns. Using a corpus of academic research articles in Education and Sociology, I investigate the extended linguistic environments in which the demonstratives this and these are used with the goal of understanding how expert writers employ demonstratives as pronouns and determiners to create cohesion. The results of the study indicate that pronominal uses of this/these most overwhelmingly refer to antecedents that are complete clauses (but not extended discourse that spans sentence boundaries). When the demonstratives are followed by a noun, shell nouns and abstract nouns are used most of the time. Shell nouns, in contrast to other abstract nouns, most often refer to antecedents that are complete clauses or that are extended, meaning that the antecedent spans sentence boundaries. The implications of these results for teaching academic writing are discussed.