Cohesive strategies in student academic writing: how register functions are realized across disciplines and genres

Abstract

Cohesive devices such as conjunctions are crucial for coherence and comprehensibility in English compositions. While these devices have been a central focus in functional discourse analysis, it remains unclear which cohesive devices systematically organize linguistic information to serve the communicative functions of texts, and how their use adapts to specific contextual conditions. To fill this gap, the current study adopted corpus-based quantitative approaches to examine the use of cohesive devices in relation to three register functions, namely Involved Narrative (IN), Informational Explanation (IE) and Stance Persuasion (SP), and how these usage patterns are moderated by discipline and genre. It was found that (1) IN texts favor first- and third-person pronouns and temporal conjunctions, IE texts emphasize cross-sentence adjective repetition, comparatives, and additive conjunctions, while SP texts rely on cross-sentence pronoun recurrence and synonymous verb repetition; (2) Discipline and genre significantly moderate these cohesion-function relationships, with notable contrasts between humanities and science/engineering fields, and between creative writing and formal academic genres. These findings underscore the context-sensitive, needs-driven use of cohesive strategies, and as such, they enhance the theoretical understanding of how micro-level cohesion supports macro-level contextual functions, while also offering practical insights for writing instruction and assessment.