Cohesive Relations Across English Varieties: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective

This thesis reports an analysis of patterns in cohesive relations from two complementary perspectives: regional and functional. Generally, this study aims to assess which linguistic resources are used to express cohesion across four varieties of English (British English, Irish English, Philippine English, and Eastern African English) and two registers: conversation and academic writing. More specifically, this thesis tests, first, if there are differences in proportions of lexical cohesion and co-reference between those languages and, second, if there are differences in proportions of lexical cohesion and co-reference between the registers.