ABSTRACT
A very common cohesive device is the use of what we shall call REFERENCE WORDS. These are words which don’t have a full meaning in their own right. To work out what they mean on any particular occasion, we have to refer to something else. They include the words he, we, it, its, this, today and larger in the following text:
(225) A businessman would not consider a firm to have solved its problems of production and to have achieved viability if he saw that it was rapidly consuming its capital. How, then, could we overlook this vital fact when it comes to that very big firm, the economy of Spaceship Earth? One reason for overlooking this vital fact is that we are estranged from reality and inclined to treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves. Now, we have indeed laboured to make some of the capital which today helps us to produce things-a large fund of scientific, technological, and other knowledge; an elaborate physical infrastructure; innumerable types of sophisticated capital equipment, etc. – but all this is just a small part of the total capital we
We turn now to some special words which need help from their environment to determine their full meaning. Because of this they are important in creating cohesion in texts. This chapter looks at the different words of this kind, and distinguishes them from substitutes.
