English for Science and Technology: A Study of Cohesive Devices in Computer Science Texts

Abstract

The study examined the grammatical cohesive devices in Computer Science texts through a comprehensive genre analysis. The texts were from eight sub registers of Computer Science. The data was collected through the corpus culled from Computer Science texts. The Systematic Functional Linguistics was used as a model of analysis for the grammatical cohesive devices found in the texts. It was discovered that the texts contained grammatical cohesive in the forms of conjunctions and reference expressions. The study also revealed that absence of ellipsis and substitution in the texts. It was equally discovered that the cohesive devices enabled the Computer Science authors to hang stretches of language together and they signaled relations between sentences. The study further highlighted the functions of the cohesive devices in giving coherence to academic writing. Therefore, the grammatical cohesive devices, is an integral part of any form of writing which connected the ideas logically.