Complex anaphora with this: variation between three written argumentative genres

The concept of complex anaphora – ‘nominal expressions referring to propositionally structured referents’ (Consten et al., 2007) – makes a useful distinction between a text-structuring function, one important to argumentative text, and the forms used to accomplish the function. Since complex anaphors often contain the demonstrative this, the contexts of all this tokens in three corpora of written argumentation – research articles, editorials and student essays – were analysed in order to identify instances of complex anaphora. While the frequencies of pronoun use for complex anaphora were similar, the frequencies of determiner use varied, as did placement of anaphors within their host sentence, with determiners appearing non-initially much more often than pronouns in all corpora, particularly editorials. Overall, there was greater variation between the patterns of use in research articles and editorials than between these and student essays.