By Stage 4 of this study (in Chapter 8) it has already become evident that errors in cohesive reference may affect textual cohesion, whether the error occurs on the level of the sentence, or it affects a larger segment of text. In Chapter 8, the three criteria for identifying a reference error were specified, which basically all stated that for one reason or another, it is not possible to identify the presupposed item for a referring item.

 

 

Figure 26 summarizes the number of errors found in total in the MA thesis corpus. As expected, low-rated theses contained a greater number of errors, except for the lexical category. The greatest difference between the high- and low-rated corpora was found in the following three categories: possessives, agreement, and unintended generic reference. Both corpora were similar in that the most worrying category of errors is the one where there is a missing presupposed item; that is, the referred entity is not introduced with a full form or an indefinite item in the text, but there is a definite noun phrase referring to it. Let us start the discussion of each category of errors with this.