The Pronoun “This” in Civil Engineering Research Articles

Cohesion, particularly through sentence boundaries, makes up the principal semantic features providing the text with the required unity. Cohesive relation is both helpful in the text unity and the readers’ textual interpretation. Among the different cohesive relations, encapsulation contributes significantly to developing the text, by which textual segments, including clauses, sentences, sequences of sentences, and paragraphs, are condensed and synthesized using cohesive markers. This study aimed to identify the frequency, textual segments encapsulated, and syntactic structure of encapsulated segments by the demonstrative pronoun “this”. Hence, 20 research articles from the discipline of Civil Engineering from five top journals published by Elsevier were selected and analyzed. Results showed that a) “This” was more frequent in the sentence-initial compared to other positions; b) “This” was utilized more to serve the function of “Encapsulation” than point-to-point cohesion; and c) “This” was used to encapsulate two syntactic structures, namely one sentence and one clause structures. The results of this study could provide a practical guide for writers (especially novice writers) of research articles in Civil Engineering and disciplines close to it about how to use the pronoun “this” to serve the function of encapsulation.