Seventh lesson

Every text has a structure. It is not just a random collection of sentences. The parts that make up the text are related in a meaningful way to each other. Recognising the way in which a text has been organised will help you to understand it better. In order to understand the text, it is necessary to understand how the sentences are related. Words like "it", "this", "that", "here", "there" etc. refer to other parts of the text. You need to understand these connections or links.

Overall there are 4 main types of links:

1. Reference
2. Ellipsis and substitution
3. Conjunction
4. Lexical cohesion

In this lesson we are going to talk about referencing and ellipsis/substitution. For those of you who follow these lessons, I presented a lesson on referencing in the speaking forum. Here we are going to review some important grammatical structures which are used in referencing.

Reference

Certain items of language in English have the property of reference. That is, they do not have meaning themselves, but they refer to something else for their meaning. How to understand referencing in a passage? In order to do this we need to know more about the grammatical structures used in referencing. Look at the following list:

1. Using subjective pronouns: I, you, he/she/it, we, you, they.
2. Using objective pronouns: me, you, him/her/it, us, you, them.
3. Using possessive adjectives: my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their.
4. Using possessive pronouns: mine, yours, his/hers/its, ours, yours, theirs.
5. Using adjective clause pronouns: who, that, which, whom, when, whose, where, why and their leaving out in the case of referring to the object.
6. Reduction of adjective clauses to adjective phrases.
7. Using Wh-question words in questions: what, which, why, where, when, what time, who, how, how much, how many, how often.
8. Using some, most, many, much, (a) few, (a) little, another, others, the other…
9. Using here, there,

There are many other instances of grammatical structures used in referencing. These are the most common and all of them refer to a single word. There are times when referencing refers to a group of words. Take the following:

1. This/that used as pronouns
2. These/those used as pronouns
3. “Which” in adjective clauses when it refers to a whole sentence.
4. So
5. They/them
6. …

Let’s see some sample texts:

The scientific study of memory began in the early 1870s when a German philosopher, Hermann Ebbinghaus, came up with the revolutionary idea that memory could be studied experimentally. In doing so he broke away from a 2000-year-old tradition that firmly assigned the study of memory to the philosopher rather than to the scientist. He argued that the philosophers had come up with a wide range of possible interpretations of memory but had produced no way of deciding which amongst these theories offered the best explanation of memory. He aimed to collect objective experimental evidence of the way in which memory worked in the hope that this would allow him to choose between the various theories.

In this text "he" and "him" refer to "Hermann Ebbinghaus". “When” and “that” refer to the words before them, “which” refers to theories. (all refere to a word)

The word “so” refers to “memory could be studied experimentally” and the word “this” refers to “collecting objective experimental evidence of the way memory worked”. (They both refer to a group of words)

In order to understand the text, you need to know what these words refer to in the text.

Similarly,

These theories all stem from some underlying assumptions about people. To a large extent unproven, they tend to represent the dominant mood or climate of opinion at that time. Schein has classified them as follows, and it is interesting to note that the categories follow each other in a sort of historical procession, starting from the time of the industrial revolution.

Here you need to know what the words "they", "them", "it" and "each other" refer to in order to understand the text.