ABSTRACT
Cohesion and coherence are key to successful writing and one way the roles are accomplished is through the use of what J. M. Swales calls ‘attended’ and ‘unattended this’. This chapter examines the possible change in the use of attended this, the options of attending nouns available to writers, and their referent content. The choices help construct a rhetorical context for academic argument, shaping the cohesion and coherence of disciplinary writing. The chapter utilizes AntConc to search for this in subject position, the ‘locus classicus’ of this construction. It presents a manual reading of concordance lines to eliminate instances in quotes or reported dialogue and identifies each valid instance as either unattended or attended with a noun/noun phrase. The chapter aims to classify the attending nouns according to the categorization suggested by Feng Jiang and Ken Hyland using MAXQDAplus.
