Cohesive Devices - Linking Adverbials

Here there is a pair of factors associated with poorer memory as people get older (isolation and loneliness). The phrase "In addition" adds another association; that between loneliness and decline in cognitive function. The reason why we don't simply have a list of three associations is because the first two are concerned with memory and the last is concerned with decline in cognitive function. Other addition adverbials include "Additionally", "Further", "Furthermore", "Also", "What is more", "Moreover".

Enumeration

The word "Hence" introduces the consequences of the fact that many things influence the growth of a plant shoot. Other adverbials which could be used here include "Therefore" , “Thus”, "Consequently" , "As a result" , "Because of this", "So".

The word “Intriguingly" is a stance adverbial. This adverbial is not cohesive. It merely signals the writer's opinion about another aspect of patients with semantic dementia - the fact that they "show early degeneration of another part of the brain..."

Concession is similar to contrast and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two, or to decide whether contrast or concession is what's on offer. But some adverbials are pretty clear that they introduce concession (e.g. even so, after all, anyhow). In this case we have "After all". In this example the writers concede that the explanation (people simply gave incorrect estimates of their age) is the only plausible one. They also give a reason for this concession; "guesswork is all we have ...." in the absence of "confirmatory evidence". Other concession adverbials are "However", "Yet", "Besides", "Nevertheless", "At any rate", "In spite of", "In any case", "All the same", "That said". Some of these (e.g. "However" and "Yet") may also be used to signal contrast.

Addition

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It must not be thought that the telescopes mentioned were the only ones completed. On the contrary, they were but the best ones selected out of many. (Holden 1881)

Concession

Other possible adverbials for signalling contrast are: "In contrast", "On the other hand", "Conversely", "Alternatively", "Instead", "In comparison".

A Note on the Use of Linking Adverbials  Linking adverbials are very useful for pointing out the relations between ideas in a text. They create cohesion and give the text a logical flow and a coherence it might not otherwise have. Academic text, because it contains argument, tends to contain more of these devices than, for example, fiction. However, not every connection needs to be signalled. Students, especially students of English as a second language, tend to pepper their essays with these devices unnecessarily. Perhaps this is because they have been explicitly taught how to use them and feel that they are an important feature of every paragraph. There may also be a backwash effect from exams such as IELTS whose marking rubrics include a section on coherence and cohesion. Authentic texts do not normally contain a lot of these devices. The best advice for students of English is to read widely and to read authentic texts in their field of study.

The word "sum" introduces a conclusion, often in the form of a summary. If it comes at the end of the whole text, as in this case, it usually offers a (very brief) summary of the whole text or the main idea or thesis statement of the text. Other summation adverbials are "In conclusion", "To conclude", "To summarize", "In the end", "In the final analysis", "In essence", "To sum up". There is often no need for these adverbials, and they may be omittted, as the final paragraph is obviously the conclusion and may even be titled as such.

The following is an excerpt from an article entitled "How we discovered that brain connections shape memories" in "The Conversation” by Carl Hodgetts, a research fellow in cognitive neuroscience at Cardiff University, and you can access the full article here. The article shows how adverbials can be used to good effect. You can also view the whole article by clicking in the top right hand corner of the box below. 

According to Herschel, the sun consisted of three essentially different parts. First, there was a solid nucleus, non-luminous, cool, and even capable of being inhabited. Second, above this was an atmosphere proper; and, lastly, outside of this was a layer in which floated the clouds, or bodies which gave to the solar surface its intense brilliancy. (Holden 1881)

Linking Adverbials Linking adverbials create a different type of cohesion in a text. Whereas reference, substitution and ellipsis require us to find ties to specific element (usually) earlier in a text, adverbials tell us about logical relations between the ideas in a text. Adverbials are cohesive because logical relations (addition, contrast, sequence, and so on) cannot exist without connected elements in the text. Apart from cohesion, adverbials help with coherence. Adverbials provide coherence by pointing out the logical flow of ideas; for example, whether we are about to read another item in a list, or something which contrasts with what we have read before. The following are the main categories of linking adverbials in English. Addition (e.g. In addition, Also, Furthermore). Enumeration (e.g. First, Second, Lastly). Result/Inference (e.g. Therefore, Consequently, So). Contrast (e.g. In contrast, On the other hand, Alternatively). Concession (e.g. However, Besides, Anyway). Apposition (e.g. In other words, For example, For instance).Summation (e.g. In conclusion, In sum, To summarise). There are two other important categories of adverbials besides linking adverbials. They are circumstance adverbials and stance adverbials but neither of these is cohesive in the same way as linking adverbials.

Contrast

Although 40% of participants in our study retrieved these fictitious memories, they are not altogether surprising. Contemporary theories of memory highlight the constructive nature of memory; memories are not “records” of events, but rather psychological representations of the self in the past. In other words, all of our memories contain some degree of fiction – indeed, this is the sign of a healthy memory system in action. But perhaps, for reasons not yet known, we have a psychological need to fictionalise memories from times of our lives that we are unable to remember. (Justice, Conway, and Akhtar 2018)

Apposition is restatement of something just said, but not merely a repetition. The writer does this to clarify, or to give some aspect of the previous statement more emphasis. The phrase "In other words" is a typical introduction to an appositive statement. Other apposition adverbials are "Which is to say", "That is", "i.e.". Some apposition adverbials introduce examples: "e.g.", "For example", "For instance".

Summation

The words our, us, we, us, us in the previous two sentences ("our personal past", "what make us human" etc.) gives a sense of how we are all similar. This is why the writer uses the word "But" to start the third sentence; we may be similar but "we don't all remember out past in the same way". But signals this contrast. However, "but" is a coordinating conjunction, not a linking adverbial. It still has a cohesive function but it doesn't belong in the category of linking adverbials.

Mouse over the highlighted words to see how the adverbials are used. Reliving and sharing our personal past is part of what makes us human. It creates a sense of who we are, allows us to plan for the future and helps us form relationships. But we don’t all remember our past in the same way. In fact, the nature and quality of memory differs considerably between people. For instance, when asked to remember something about a party, one person might describe vividly their sixth birthday: how the gifts were laid out, the sweet, chocolatey taste of the hedgehog cake and going to bed really late. Another person might not recall this precise detail, but remember that their aunt despised parties and that hedgehog cakes were massive in the 80s. So, our personal memories contain different types of information. Some of this is very specific about when and where things happened – and what it felt like. This collection of personal experiences is known as “episodic memory”. Other bits are general facts about the world, ourselves and the people we know. This is called “semantic memory”. A big question in neuroscience is whether these two memory types involve distinct parts of the brain. Individuals who have suffered damage to a region called the hippocampus (involved in memory, learning and emotion) have been found to remember facts about their lives but lack the high-resolution, episodic detail. On the other hand, patients with a rare form of dementia, known as semantic dementia, can remember episodic information, but not the facts that glue it all together. Intriguingly, these individuals show early degeneration of another part of the brain called the anterior temporal lobe (thought to be critical for semantic memory). (Hodgetts 2017)

So how can I remember being a baby? And why did 2,487 people from our study remember events that they dated from the age of two years and younger? One explanation is that people simply gave incorrect estimates of their age in the memory. After all, unless confirmatory evidence is present, guesswork is all we have when it comes to dating memories from across our lives, including the very earliest. (Justice, Conway, and Akhtar 2018)

Apposition

The words "In fact" is a stance adverbial, not a linking adverbial. A stance adverbial makes a comment on the current topic of discussion in the text. The words “in fact” show the writer’s stance on the the topic of how different people remember their past in different ways. “In fact" signals that something is real or true and is often followed by further comment or evidence which reinforces the previous statement. This is exactly what happens in this text; having said that “we don’t all remember our past in the same way”, the writer reinforces this idea by stating that the differences are considerable in two ways. The nature of memory and the quality of memory are both different. This is a typical use of the stance adverbial “In fact”. It does have a cohesive function linking the two sentences and therefore could be considered as linking adverbial in this case.

The word “So" is a linking adverbial. It is a linking adverbial in the result/inference category. In this case the meaning is: as a result of what we have just said we can conclude that …. or even: to summarise …. “So" is a very common linking word and often a very general one, not being much more than a filler or transition.

The experiment revealed that the participants recalled significantly more information from the second file if they had saved the previous file. This suggests that by saving or “offloading” information on to a computer, we are freeing up cognitive resources that enable us to memorise and recall new information instead. In sum, anyone worrying that technology is wrecking one of our most important abilities should take some reassurance from these findings. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no cause for concern: for instance McCartney said in the same interview that the songs in the 1960s that did make it to the recording studio were the most memorable ones. So it is possible that the lack of technology made The Beatles better songwriters. (Noreen 2015)

Result/Inference

Other Examples The following examples are taken from various different texts.

The words "First", "Second" and "lastly" are all typical enumeration adverbials. They are cohesive because, in this case, they list each of the "three essentially different parts" mentioned in the first sentence. Other adverbials of this type include "firstly", "secondly (etc.)", "to begin with", "initially", "to start with", "first of all", "in the first (second ...) place", "next", "for one thing ..... (and) for another thing", "eventually", "finally".

"For instance" is a linking adverbial. It is a linking adverbial in the apposition category. Apposition means giving more information about a previous statement, either as a restatement with more information or as an example. In this case we have a whole paragraph about how different people may remember an event. So the whole of this paragraph is an example in support of the claim that “the nature and quality of memory differs considerably between people". "For instance" is very often used to introduce examples like this.

One major study on ageing – which collects data from more than 18,000 UK over-50s about physical and mental health, well-being, finances and attitudes towards ageing – found that isolation and loneliness were associated with poorer memory, especially among those with lower levels of education. In addition, loneliness in older age was associated with a steeper decline in cognitive function. This included worse memory and verbal fluency. (Carrino and Pabon 2019)

The phrase “On the other hand" is a linking adverbial. It is a linking adverbial in the contrast category. The contrast here is between people with damage to the hippocampus amd people with semantic dementia. People with hippocampus damage remember facts but not episodic detail, whereas people with semantic dementia retain episodic detail but not "the facts that glue it all together". This paragraph would be clear without this linking adverbial but its presence makes the contrast much clearer and improves the readability of the text.

The amount that the shoot grows in one year depends on very many things, on the light and warmth it gets, on its food and the growth of its neighbours. Hence, in the growth of different shoots in the same year, or the same shoot in different years, we find very great differences. (Stopes n.d.)