Encapsulation and types of referential and relational coherence: pronoun ello as a an encapsulator mechanism in the written discourse of Economics

Abstract

In this article a study focused on the encapsulation mechanisms served by pronoun ello in a corpus of texts from four genres of academic Economics discourse is presented (Corpus PUCV-UCSC-2013). This research seeks: a) to identify the types of anaphoric reference encapsulated by the pronoun ello, and b) to determine the types of semantic coherence relation in which the encapsulator pronoun ello operates. The corpus consists of 152 texts: 14 Research Articles, 55 Exercise Guide, 45 Monetary Policy Reports, and 38 Textbooks. The results show that 3,124 occurrences of the encapsulator pronoun were identified in the corpus. The findings reveal that, on the one hand, the Clause Complex is, on average, the anaphoric referent encapsulated with higher frequency of occurrence and, second, that the most frequent type of semantic relation is causality. In terms of discourse genres, the encapsulator does not record occurrences in the Exercise Guide and it shows some variations in the types of coherence relations among the other three genres.