REFERENCE AS A DEVICE OF GRAMMATICAL COHESION IN THE ABSTRACTS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN

Along with the title, the abstract is a part of the research article that readers first encounter when they want to read a particular article as it provides the most important information related to the article itself. The appealing character of an abstract depends mostly on its content and the way it has been written. This article compares the use of reference as part of grammatical cohesion in mechanical engineering and social science abstracts in English and Serbian. Three types of reference have been analysed, namely personal, demonstrative and comparative in the corpus comprising 25 researcharticle abstracts for each discipline and each language. More frequent use of reference, primarily demonstrative, in the English abstracts implies that their authors use those structures not only to achieve better textual cohesion and density of expression, but also to guide their readers through the text. Especially, the combination of demonstratives and the definite article with general and other nouns leads to the interlacing of lexical and grammatical cohesion, thus providing a wider range of expressions, argumentation and generalization. Unlike the English abstracts, the mechanical abstracts in Serbian rely more on lexical cohesion, with very few personal pronouns as cohesive devices. The awareness of such differences can be animportant guideline to all researchers attempting to write for international readership.