f"'" ' , ; O.

,;~
Pennock Speck, Barry Suau Jimnez, Francisca
Antonia (1998) Text coherence and pragmatic failure
Quaderns de Filologia IV. Universitat de Valncia:
...!~"~. QUADERNS DE FILOLOGIA , ~i.
~~..
105-121.
~ . ESTUDIS LINGSTICS ~

TE.XT COHJERENCE
AND PRAGMATIC FAILURE

Barry Pennock Speck

& Francisca Suau Jimnez

FACULTAT DE FILOLOGIA

UNIVERSITAT DE VALENCIA

/
 TEXT COHERENCE AND PRAGMATIC FAILURE*

Barry Pennock
Francisca Suau
Universitat de Valencia

1.1. lntroduction

EFL university students in the context of studies in English

Philology often reach an adequate standard in speaking and writing
informal English. However, they have difficulty mastering sorne of the
formal genres they are required to produce such as acadernic essays.
Students often seem to have got most things right in their essays or
other writing tasks but teachers are still left with the feeling that
something is arniss. After analysing students' texts, the conclusion that
many teachers come to is that the fault lies somewhere above the level
of the sentence but that it is difficult to pinpoint with exactitude. The
question is then, what factors contribute to the "foreignness" of
students' written production?
An underlying factor may be that non-native speakers of English
are influenced by their own L 1. A strong claim is that influence of this
type rnight eventually be able to explain all, or nearly all, the problems
leamers of an Liare faced with (Ellis, 1965; Corder, 1978). A weaker
claim is that a leamer' s mother tongue influences the way a foreign
language is leamed but that there are other aspects to be taken into
account including cultural and affective factors (Linton, 1960;
Schumann, 1978). If we take the second claim as our starting point,
i.e., that the way we leam a language is affected, to a certain extent, by
the influence of our first language, then it rnight be considered useful
to contrast both languages. Many contrastive studies have indeed been
carried out, but most have focused on structures within the sentence

* Este trabajo es fruto del proyecto de investigacin La competencia pragm-

tica de estudiantes universitarios de ingls: anlisis intercultural (ref.: UV
96-1.767), financiado por la Universitat de Valencia. Una versin anterior de
este artculo se acept como ponencia en el XVI Congreso Nacional de
AESLA, 1998.
106 Barry Pennock and Francisca Suau
while relatively little work has been done on the difference between
languages at the level of text or discourse.
Another factor contributing to the feeling of "foreignness" in
students' essays may be that the way we organise discourse differs
across cultures. A certain amount of suprasentential contrastive
research has been carried out in the field of intercultural rhetolic.
Eggington & Ricento (1983), practitioners in intercultural research,
claim that a number of studies support the view that the rhetoric of the
native culture can interfere with the essay performance of students and
they cite the following authors: Kaplan (1972; 1978), Cline ( 1980),
Harder (1980), McDaniel (1981). The interest of all these researchers
les in formal genres, especially in the way essays are organised,
which includes the study of markers of coherence and cohesion. They
claim that the use of anaphoric devices in written texts is not just an
issue of grarnmar but one bf rhetoric, that is, the default procedures for
writing in a particular genre that are learned or acquired by members
of a particular culture. The pattems of use of cohesive devices, which
are distinct for each genre, pose a problem for learners at the local and
text level due to the fact that the choice of one cohesive device or
another depends not only on contiguous structures but on the text
taken as a whole. Thus, non-natives are faced with two main problems
when they tackle a text in a language different from their own. First,
they have an imperfect mastery of sentential structures and vocabulary
in the target language. This leaves them little time to acquire the
textual pattems that native speakers, by virtue of their living, studying
and working in the native culture, acquire in a natural way. Second,
they are in permanent danger of being influenced by their own L1
which may have rhetorical and textual pattems for each genre that are
very different from the L 2 .
Finally, sorne authors feel that many of the problems that students
have when speaking or writing in a foreign language have nothing to
do with differences in the two systems but may be due to students
over-achieving, as it were, in certain areas with a view to getting their
message across (Blum-Kulka, 1986; Red, 1992). This is one aspect of
what has come to be known as "pragmatic failure" (Thomas, 1983).
In the following section we will review sorne of the research on
coherence and cohesion in English and Spanish. More specifically, we
will be looking at determiners and a series of noun-phrases called
Anaphoric nouns. We have centred our attention on Anaphoric nouns
as it would be impossible to cover all the cohesion markers in the
scope of a paper of this length, and more importantly because we
believe that the role of Anaphoric nouns is crucial in text organisation
in both these languages. In subsequent sections we will provide a
tentative set of hypotheses as to why re-entry items contribute to
foreignness. This will be followed by the analysis we have carried out
Text Coherence and Pragmatic Failure 107
on a corpus of letters written by English and Spanish speakers and the
conclusions we have reached based on the results of this analysis.
1.2. Review of coherence and cohesion
The study of coherence and cohesion is of interest to linguists from
many schools as these two concepts have often been seen as a way of
explaining the difference between text and non-text. There have been
many definitions of both these terms but generally there is agreement
that coherence is an abstract concept while cohesion is a rather more
tangible surface phenomenon. The definitions of these terms given by
Hoey (1991) are typical of this dichotomy. He states that "cohesion is
a property of the text" and is "objective, capable in principie of
automatic recognition" while coherence is "a facet of the reader's
evaluation of a text" and is "subjective and judgements conceming it
may vary from reader to reader" (Hoey, 1991: 12). An important
function of many text components related to the phenomena of
coherence and cohesion is to make the text "hang together", as Hasan
puts it (1984: 184). Sorne characteristics of a coherent text are, for
instance, the chronological sequencing carried out through consecutio
temporum, the discourse topic, which can be described as "what the
text is about", and logical sequences, such as those proposed by
Jordan (1984) and Mann & Thompson (1988), i.e., condition, cause,
purpose, etc. Cohesion markers, which we are interested in here, are
of a more grammatical nature than the above, that is, most are
function words. They are described in Halliday & Hasan's (1976)
exhaustive study on cohesion in the English language and cover such
items as pronouns, the definite article, substitution, ellipsis,
conjunction and lexical cohesion. Lexical cohesion, which has since
proved to be of great interest to many researchers, is dealt with in
more detail by Hasan (1985) and H.oey (1991) among others. An list
of the types of lexical cohesion analysed by Hasan (1985) and Hoey
(1991) is offered by Stotsky (1983):
l. Semantically related words: a type of cohesion in which on lexical element
is systematically related to a previous one through:
l. Repetition
2. Synonomy
3. Opposition or contrast
4. Inclusion as a co-ordinate, superordinate, or subordinate member in an
ordered set (general or specific terms)
5. Derivation or repetition of a derivational element.
108 Barry Pennock and Francisca Suau
II. Collocationally related words: a type of cohesion in which one lexical ele-
ment is related to another only through frequent co-occurence in similar con-
texts. (Stotsky, 1983: 441)
The difference between I and II is that the members of the first
group constitute, along with their antecedents, what Halliday & Hasan
( 1976) call "referential cohesion", that is, the anaphoric item refers
back to a specific antecedent and not simply to a member of the same
class. For example, "the first group" in the preceding sentence refers
back to "I. Semantically related words" above. The items in the
second group form collocational relationships between members of
the same class but do not refer back to specific members of that class;
for example, a group of words su ch as "teachers", "learners", "school"
may be part of a lexical set which refers to education. Various authors,
including Huddleston (1978) and McCarthy (1994) have expressed
their doubts as to whether such relations are cohesive at all.
We will concentrate on demonstrative pronouns and a set of
expressions called Anaphoric Nouns or A-Nouns (Francis, 1986).
These nouns belong to the first group above. In Francis's analysis of
newspaper editorials, she found that A-nouns, a combination of
content and structure words, play a part in holding the text together
while at the same time developing it. To achieve A-noun status
Francis claims that a noun:
must be functioning as a pro-forrn and as such be anaphorically cohesive
devices, referring metadiscursively to a stretch of discourse preceding it in
terrns of how the writer chooses to !abe! or interpret the latter for the purposes
of his/her argument. In other words [they] must be presented as synonymous
with the proposition(s) immediately preceding. (Francis, 1986: 3)
The following excerpt, taken from a newspaper editorial from her
corpus, exemplifies what she means. The definite noun phrase, "this
line of reasoning", in the second paragraph, refers back to the whole
previous paragraph while at the same time carrying the discourse
forward.
Now, according to the pessimists, this superiority gives rise to an extreme
peri!. ln practice, the missiles carried by submarines or bombers do not have
the accuracy of ground-based missiles. Once the Minutemen have been
eliminated, the American retaliation, aimed at the broad target of towns,
would trigger the 'mutual destruction' for which no statesman could assume
responsibility.
According to this line of reasoning, the destruction of the Minutemen would
amount to disa:rming the United States, which would be left with nothing but
Text Coherence and Pragmatic Failure 109
the means to negotiate for defeat, if not surrender. (Encounter , June-July
1982: 14)
At the end of the monograph Francis tentatively proposes the
existence of a large group of "non-metadiscursive" A-nouns that could
be linked to different text types. She suggests that there would be a
large number of such A-nouns. The type she had in mind were made
up of the following head-words: "development", "stage'', "process'',
"event", "step", "incident", "move", "conditions", "situation", etc.
Because of the nature of letter writing, and the length of the texts in
our corpus, we have widened the scope of Anaphoric nouns even
further to include simple lexical repetition with determiners as the
probability of there being a large number of metadiscursive nouns and
a wide variety of lexical variation through anaphora is remote.
The function words that may precede A-nouns, according to
Francis (1986) are the definite article, demonstratives and words like
"another", "such'', and the comparatives. The A-nouns which are
preceded by the definite article and the demonstratives "this" and
"that", however, are by far the most common and seem to cause
students the most problems. The research on the role of such devices
in texts is scarce. Although the cohesive role of demonstratives and
the definite article has been touched on by man y, including Hendricks
(1976) and Dillon (1981), it was not the central issue of their research.
One of the few studies of the use of these items was carried out by
McCarthy (1994). He analyses the pronoun "it" and the demonstrative
pronouns "this" and "that" within the context of text excerpts.
McCarthy tentatively claims that "it" is used for unmarked reference
while "this": "signals a shift of entity or focus of attention to a new
focus" (McCarthy, 1994: 275). The pronoun "that" is used to refer
"across from the current focus to entities or foci that are non-current,
non-central, marginalizable or other-attributed" (McCarthy , 1994:
275).
McCarthy (1994) did not analyse the cohesive use of the article or
that of the demonstratives in their role as modifiers, but it would seem
to follow that "the" + noun phrase has the same unmarked role as "it"
while the functions of the demonstratives "this/these" + noun phrase
and "that/those" + noun phrase are parallel to that of the pronoun
"this" and "that" respectively. However, it is obvious that, despite the
sirnilarities, Anaphoric nouns are more complex than pronouns as they
include modifiers and head-words. Pennock & Llacer (1995) found
that A-nouns preceded by the definite article or the demonstratives
"this" and "that" were numerous in the role of "re-entry items"
(Jordan, 1984) in the scientific articles that they analysed. Their
hypothesis was that the large number of the unmarked form of Anap-
horic nouns preceded by "the" is logical as it simply marks an entity as
110 Barry Pennock and Francisca Suau
already being in focus. In other words, A-nouns preceded by "the"
simply re-enter an entity but do not focus the reader' s attention on
themselves in any special way. The large number of occurrences of
A-nouns preceded by "this", however, is dueto the desire to bring the
preceding text into focus and signal it as important in the discourse.
Thus, the function of "this" + A-noun head seems to be linked with the
need to introduce change while maintaining the focus on the
antecedent. It is quite logical that A-nouns preceded by "that" should
be far less numerous as their function seems to be that of a
"marginalizer", to signal something as non-central to the discourse at a
particular moment.
To attempt to account for possible differences between native and
non-native use of A-nouns in written English, it is necessary to look at
the way the definite article and demonstratives in Spanish may differ
with respect to the English system. According to Mederos (1988), the
Spanish system of demonstratives is based on the position of the
referent relative to the speaker although variations due to the
subjectivity of the speaker and other factors are common. The
demonstrative "este" denotes proxirnity to the speaker while "aquel"
denotes distance from the speaker. According to Mederos "ese" is
neutral in this respect. Mederos goes as far as to say that "ese/este" can
even alternate without affecting the meaning of the utterance. Besides
proxirnity, "este" can also be used when something is of special
interest, new or remarkable to the speaker. Femndez (1951) states
that "este" is used when new information is added to what has already
been said about the referent. In other words, "este" can be described as
a case of strong deixis , whereas "ese" is an example of weak deixis.
Mederos (1988) coincides with McCarthy in that "ese", like "that",
marks an entity as marginal to the discourse. None of the Spanish
authors consulted: Mederos (1988), Femndez (1951), Abad (1977),
compare the anaphoric use of the definite article with that of the
demonstratives so it is a matter of conjecture when one is preferred
over the others. However, it seems the Spanish definite article, like its
English counterpart, adds little orno meaning to re-introduced entities,
aside from definiteness, and that "este" and "ese" have the same values
as "this" and "that" in English. The demonstrative "aquel" can be left
out of our review of the demonstratives as it is relatively infrequent
and normally has a very marked meaning and should not, therefore,
influence the way Spanish speakers use English demonstratives one
way or the other. To conclude it seems that the English and Spanish
systems are, mutatis mutandi, quite similar, and any divergence in the
use of the English system by Spanish students does not appear to be
dueto Ll interference.
Text Coherence and Pragmatic Fa ilure 111
1.3. Hypotheses
Our first hypothesis is that A-nouns, like all the elements involved
in suprasentential relations are problematic for Spanish students. We
base this feeling on our experience as teachers and exarniners of
English as a Foreign Language. Tyler (1994) lends support to this
intuition when she states that non-native students of English, because
of their difficulty with anaphoric repetition, often fail to "establish a
mutual interpretation ofkey terms" in their essays (Tyler, 1994: 681).
Our second hypothesis is that problems with text organisation may be
caused by one or two factors, i.e., Ll influence on both a grammatical
and discourse level and/or failures in the leamers' strategies in written
communication. Although L l influence in the case of A-nouns, given
the sirnilarity in the two systems, seems to be unlikely it is unwise to
discard it a priori. lt is, therefore, necessary to exercise precaution as
even small differences in the L 1 and Li may point towards a reason
for the problems that students have. What is more, even though there
may be real differences between two systems, this does not always
lead to the results we expect. As Reid (1992) points out in a study of
the expository essays of Spanish natives in English, although Spanish
speakers do not use personal pronouns as much as English speakers,
they may use more than English speakers in their essays.
1.4. Corpus selection
To test our hypotheses we analysed thirty mock letters written to
an American university asking for information about a summer
course. Ten of the letters were written by native English University
students. The other twenty were written by two groups of ten Spanish
students: a group of first year University students anda group of third
year University students. To ensure that the groups would be of very
different levels of proficiency, in the first year student group, we
selected only the letters written by students who had never been to an
English speaking country. On the other hand, the ten texts chosen in
the second group were those written by students who had all spent
sorne time in England. We believe that because a person's
interlanguage is not static but dynarnic, and gets closer to the language
of a native speaker as the student leams, it is useful to have two groups
at different levels in order to see whether the non-natives' grasp of
cohesive devices progresses in parallel with the acquisition of
vocabulary, structures, etc.
An additional criterion for the selection of the native and
non-natives texts used in the research was that of length. We decded
to keep the length of text in the corpus as uniform as possible and eli-
rninated texts which were too short. We feel that length is an
important variable to take into account as any divergence in this area
112 Barry Pennock and Francisca Suau
may lead to the research results becoming unreliable. Haswell (1988)
supporters the view that length of text may invalidate the research
carried out by linugists who do not take it into account. He wams that
taking a linear approach to text length when analysing text cohesion
can lead to incon-ect results. It is not true, as may appear at first sight,
that a text which is double the length of another will contain twice as
many cohesive ties. In fact, according to Haswell such a text may have
four times as many cohesive ties because a word may be the antece-
dent to more than one "coherer" thus he says: "While words increase
l+l+l ... , opportunities increase 1+2+3 ..." (1988: 429). However,
he points out that we must be aware that there is always a certain
amount ofredundancy with regards to cohesive elements coupled with
the fact that function words rarely act as antecedents to other
"coherers", all of which reduces the potential amount of cohesion.
It must be said, nonetheless, that length of text is not totally
arbitrary and it has been proved to depend, to a certain extent, on the
leve! of English proficiency. According to Blum-Kulka (1986), who
centred on how the length of utterance was a sign of the way the
language of non-natives was divergent with regards to that of natives,
there is often a tendency for non natives to be prolix, they, therefore,
use:
more words than the native speaker in arder to "accomplish a similar
pragmatic act". In this case, pragmatic failure might result from
overindulgence in words, creating a lack of appropriateness which might
cause the hearer to react with impatience. (Blum-Kulka, 1986: 175)
She goes on to say that such divergence is not uniform but changes
depending on how proficient a student becomes:
First, at lower levels of proficiency [. . . ] leamers tend to avoid verbosity
since their knowledge of the language is so limited, which ironically keeps
them closer to the native norm in terms of utterance length. Second, at high
and intermediate and advanced levels the leamers gain confidence with
respect to their linguistic knowledge, but are more concemed with the
effectiveness of their speech acts, and thus tend to be considerably more ver-
bose than their native counterparts. (Blum-Kulka, 1986: 177)
These observations are certainly borne out by the data from fe
thirty texts we looked at (see Table 1). The natives and the
intermediate non-natives took, in general, fewer words to get across
the same amount of information, than the advanced non-natives did.
However, the texts of both groups of non-natives had a slightly lower
"lexical density" (Ure, 1971) than the natives. In other words, the nati-
ves employed a greater number of separate words when compared to
Text Coherence and Pragmatic Failure 113
the total number of words used than the non-natives, who, therefore,
used more repetition.
Table 1
Natives Advanced NN Imermediate NN
Average Length
of letters 187,3 21 8,6 181,1
Lexical Density 0,2071 0,18265 0,1757
1.5. Method of Analysis
In order to compare the use of anaphoric devices by the native
speakers and the two groups of non-natives, the first step in the
analysis of the corpus was to select all the demonstrative pronouns,
demonstrative modifiers + noun phrases and definite articles + noun
phrases. The next step was to identify only those that functioned
anaphorically. This meant looking at each instance of the above
structures to decide whether the definite noun phrases used were really
anaphoric re-entry devices --examples of cataphora were not taken
into consideration- or simply phrases that always require a definite
article as in:
(1) I am a third year student of English Philology at the University of
Valencia.
Once only true anaphoric devices were identified, they were
separated into groups depending on the deterrniner which preceded
them. The final step in the analysis was to decide whether a particular
instance of anaphora conformed to the native norm. Decisions as to
what was acceptable were made were using our intuitive reactions to
the non-native texts. We believe that this is not a drawback as
decisions with regard to the "correctness" or otherwise of a text must
always be of a subjective nature.
1.6. Results
The first result found is that there seems to be a greater tendency
towards repetition of re-entry devices in general in the non-native texts
than in the native texts. We can observe this by looking at the lexical
densty column in Table 2. The lexical density of the demonstrative
"that" and the pronoun "it" is stightly higher in both non-native groups
but the differences are especially pronounced with regards to the
demonstrative "this":
114 Barry Pennock and Francisca Suau Text Coherence and Pragmatic Failure 115

Table 2 1.6.2. "That" + noun phrase

Natives Advanced NN Intermediate NN The next difference between the native and non-native texts is that
Function Total Lexical Function Total Lexical Function Total Lexical the demonstrative pronoun and modifier "that" is employed
words number density words number density words number density considerably more in the non-native texts than in those of the natives.
the 72 0,0386 the 77 0,03534 the 50 0,0277 The examples below are tak.en from our intermediate non-native and
this 4 0,0021 this 12 0,00597 this 17 0,0094 advanced non-native texts. Examples 3, 4, 6b, and 10 conform to the
that 0,0005 that 9 0,00367 that 3 0,0017 norm and are acceptable although perceptible foreignness is caused in
Total 95 0,051 Total 116 0,05324 Total 97 0,0538 example 4, 6, and 7 due to poor vocabulary skills. Once these
problems are solved, by replacing "about that" with "like that" in 4,
1.6.1. The definite article + noun phrase "cause" with "reason" in 6, and "theme" with "subject" in 7b, these
expressions would be perfectly acceptable. In examples 7 (a & c) and
The definite article A-noun tumed out to be the most common 8a, however, "that" can be replaced by the definite article without any
re-entry item in all the texts, which, as we said above, is to be expected loss of meaning or clarity with regards to antecedent reference. In
given its default status. However, there was a significant drop in the example 9 the definite article could also replace "that" but only if
number of noun-phrases preceded by the definite article in the case of "summer" was ornitted. The use of "that" to the detriment of the
the advanced non-native students and the intermediate non-native definite article in these phrases seems to be due to a desire to mak.e the
students. These results are surprising taking into account that in antecedent of the re-entry device clearer. lt is also observable that
Spanish definite articles are used for both count and mass nouns excessive lexical repetition is taking place -in the case of example 9,
whether the noun-phrases they precede are general or specific. This in the modifying phrase. Repetition also causes "foreignness" in
leads to a strong tendency for Spanish speak.ers to employ the definite example 5, in which the noun phrase introduced by "that" could be
article in English much more than is necessary in non-cohesive tasks replaced by "it". As a result of these errors, these cohesive devices
and one would expect such a tendency to increase the number of seem too marked to the native reader.
cohesive noun phrases preceded by "the". In nigo et al. (1996) it was
discovered that non-native students found the difference between noun (3) Another question that I must know is how much time the course lasts
phrase preceded by a definite article and noun phrases without definite and whether I could li ve during that time in a Hall of Residence.
articles one of the most difficult to master. The following is an
example from our corpus of the inappropriate use of the definite article (4) There are other things that I would like to ask you and these are ifl need
and can safely be attributed to Ll influence: a previous qualifications or language standard and if at the end of the course
there is an exam, a proof or there isn't anything about that.
(2) I'm a Spanish student who is interested in spending the next summer at
your University. (5) I would like to know if there is an exarn at the end of the course, and if
we will obtain a diploma in case we pass that possible exam.
The non-natives' desire to "mak.e sure" that the reader identifies the
antecedent may be the reason far the small numbers of definite articles (6) I arna student of English Philology in Spain. I am studying 4th degree at
and the correspondingly higher numbers of demonstratives modifiers the Valencian University and I have decided to go abroad that summer for
in the non-native texts. The non-native may feel that only "strong" increasing my proficiency in English language, for that cause I am interested
connectors will be enough to mak.e it sufficiently clear to the reader in the summer course in English that your university of Rhode Island offer to
which antecedent the cohesive device is referring back to. This ties in me.
with Blum-Kulka's (1986) general idea that overindulgence in the use
of certain words and the subsequent lack of appropriateness may be (7) I would like to know sorne informations about (a) that course, because at
due to a particular kind of pragmatic failure, i.e. the desire to ensure my university there is not any person dedicated to (b) that theme, such as how
that the reader understands what the writer is trying to get across. long is the course, which are the contents and the different subject I will be
able to study, how much should I pay for (c) that course.
116 Barry Pennock and Francisca Suau
(8) I am also interested in knowing if there will be an exam at the end of the
course and if my studies at that course will be reflected in a diploma or
something like that.
(9) I read last Monday in my university magazine an advertisement about
your summer course in English literature. I would like to take that summer
course, but I need sorne information.
(10) Well, I think that is ali. Thank you very much for your help.
1.6.3. "This" + noun phrase
By far the greatest divergence between native and non-native texts
concemed the pronoun and demonstrative modifier "this". In both
groups of non-natives there is a superabundance of these re-entry
devices. Once more, the reason in many cases seems to be that the
non-natives are especially worried about making anaphoric
expressions clear with regards to their antecedents. Out of a total of
twenty-nine examples, thirteen are deemed to be correct, while the
majority of the errors, nine in all, involve the inclusion of "this"
instead of the definite article. A typical example of the incorrect use of
"this" can be seen in example llb below. The antecedent is "course"
and the student has chosen to re-enter it preceded by the demonstrative
modifier "this" although the altemative with "the" would be more
appropriate.
(11) I would like to know when the course will start and what the course will
teach me exactly if I attend. About the leve! in the language, to take part in
this course, do I have to speak English fluently or can I choose the most
appropriate leve! according to my knowledge?
The same error occurs in example 12c where the inappropriate use
of "this" coincides with the heavy-handed repetition of "course".
(12) First of ali I would like to know about the content and duration of the
course and also about the money I will have to pay.
I would like you to know I will have the advanced leve! of English (a) this
summer and my leve! of French is rather poor; I would like to know what
leve! ofEnglish and French is required for (b) this course.
Please, I would like to obtain sorne information about ali these matters and
about how, when and where I can make my inscription for (e) this course.
As with the problems encountered with "that", foreignness may
also dueto a lack of vocabulary as in example 13 where the pronoun
"this", although acceptable with regards to its anaphoric function,
could be replaced by the adverb "next". The same can be said of "this"
Text Coherence and Pragmatic Failure 117
in example 14, which refers back to the previous sentence. In this
example "this" could be replaced by the adverb "so".
(13) Secondly, I want to know if there is an exam at the end of the course and
if I will obtain any diploma.
After this, it is very important to me to know the place where I could live, if
there is any possibility of living in a Hall of Residence.
(14) I'm writing to you this letter because I would like to spend this summer
studying English. My parents can't afford to pay me a joumey to America and
because of this I have thought of studying in one of the American universities
that are in Spain. I have choose your University because it is near from my
village.
In two cases, "this" could be replaced by the possessive "your" as
in example 15.
(15) Stimated Head of Department, I would like to ask the following
questions for knowing more about (a) this course in America. I have good
references about (b) this university.
Finally I will be waiting your answer impatiently for resolving my doubts
about this University.
By far the most common error is the use of "this" instead of the
definite article. In 16a below, the definite article would be more
suitable than "this" as no new information is added about the course,
the student is simply asking a question about it. Compare this with
16b, which is an example of the correct use of the demonstrative
pronoun "this" used to refer to a whole chunk of text.
(16) I'm very interested in spending next summer atan American University,
because I'm studying English Philology and French (as a second language),
and I think that a course of French Language and Literature in America will
help me to improve my French, and also my English, as I will be in contact
with Americans.
I would like you send me information about the duration of (a) this course. (b)
This is important to me because I am only spend two months in America.
In example l 7b, we see the demonstrative where omission would
be possible, that is, the last sentence could finish after "conditions".
However, the student chooses to re-introduce the "Hall of Residence"
through the Anaphoric no un "this place". A similar case can be found
in example 18, in which "this course" can be replaced by "the course"
or omission of the whole phrase. In most of the examples the students
appear to be anxious to make sure the reader is absolutely clear which
course they are talking about.
118 Barry Pennock and Francisca Suau
(17) It would also be of sorne help to know if there is a possibility ofliving in
a Hall of Residence and, in case (a) this could be possible, the conditions of
(b) this place.
(18) I would like to know when the course will start and what the course will
teach me exactly if I attend. About the leve! in the language, to take part in
this course, do I have to speak English fluently or can I choose the most
appropriate leve! according to my knowledge?
1.7. Conclusions
From the analysis of the corpus it seems clear that the way the non-
natives employ the cohesive devices we have seen above deviates, on
many occasions, from the native norm. However, contrary to the
hypothesis that Ll influence may be the cause of the problem, such
deviations do not seem to be due to two radically different systems.
There are more similarities than differences between the English and
Spanish system of determiners with regards to their function. A more
likely reason for the problems the students have is their apparent
anxiousness to mark anaphoric relationships more strongly than they
would in their own language. This is clear when we look at the
distribution of the determiners in the corpus. In the case of the non-
natives, although the large numbers of one particular construction,
"that" + noun phrase, were practically confined to one text, the
overabundance of another, "this" + noun phrase, was spread over
severa! texts. Moreover, both of these "marked" determiners were
relatively more common in the non-native texts than in the native texts
while the opposite was found in the case of noun phrases preceded by
the definite article. Thus, the hypothesis that students ' problems with
re-entry devices is caused by a form of "pragmatic failure" appears to
supported by the data.
As teachers we now have to ask ourselves what the practica!
conclusions of our research are. If the problems analysed constituted a
clear case of L 1 interference, as is the case of the non-cohesive use of
the definite article, we could recommend that the teacher either remark
on the differences between the students' L 1 and the ~ in class to
heighten their awareness of them, or draw up a series of exercises
highlighting said differences, or do both. Short translation exercises
such as those suggested in Pennock & Santaemilia (1995) would be
suitable in these circumstances. However, we have seen that the
problem here does not involve any such systematic differences but is
the result of an over-zealousness on the part of the learner when
signalling anaphoric relationships. A possible solution for difficulties
in this area is to supply the students with cloze exercises to help them
to focus on anaphoric "ti es". This type of exercise is ideal for
Text Coherence and Pragmatic Failure 119
perfecting suprasentential relationships as whole texts are used. What
is more, the open-class members of the A-noun can be left visible
while the function word, which is the part of the A-noun causing the
problem, is elided, making it easier for the student to concentrate on
the role of the determiner. Another solution could be to draw the
students' attention to text organisation and information management,
which anaphoric re-entry devices form part of.
The problems students have with the organisation of language
beyond the sentence are rarely addressed in the classroom. This is
often due to the lack of time available and the need to teach syntactic
structures, vocabulary and communicative skills. Another possible
reason is that teachers themselves feel uncomfortable with
suprasentential relations. lt is, therefore, up to researchers and teachers
to provide stimulating material through which students can learn about
how texts are organised in order to help them with the comprehension
and production of texts in English. We hope that this paper is a
contribution, however modest, to that task.
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