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Cohesive Devices - Linking Adverbials

How linking adverbials are used to render texts more cohesive and readable

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.


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 on THE CONVERSATION website. 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. 


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 n.d.)
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.
Other Examples
The following examples are taken from various different texts.
Addition
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 n.d.)
Enumeration

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)
Result/Inference
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.)
Contrast
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
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 n.d.)
Apposition
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 n.d.)
Summation
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 n.d.)
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.

You can test your understanding of these adverbials with the Linking Adverbials Quiz

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