Some items in our analysis are not cohesive simply because they are not referential either. Their presence is due to either grammatical constraints (for examples, see D3–5) or to the fact that they are part of a multi-word lexical item or an idiomatic expression (D1). Examples for the latter are: out of the blue, all over the place, etc.

Endophorics (Hyland, 2000, 113) are also regarded referential here (e.g., this study, this paper, here, in this research), as they refer to textual features and not to abstract logical relationships. Endophorics are part of the “metatext” (Swales, 2004, 121; “textual metadiscourse” in Hyland, 2000, 116) which contains text segments that refer to the organization of the whole paper. When speaking about the metatext, the scope of its reference can be the whole paper, a chapter, a section, a paragraph, or a sentence in it.

(Examples from Biber et al., 1991, 155.)

Clefting: it-clefts “are used to bring particular elements of the structure into focus” (Biber et al., 1991, 155), for example: It was a new stool that I was trying to get, but I bought an armchair.