Resumptive Post-Modification as a Cohesive Feature of Signalling Nouns

This chapter describes one of the ways in which signalling nouns (SNs), abstract nouns such as problem, process, and reason, may function in context in discourse. The focus is on their use in identifying relational clauses and the way in which post-modification of the SN in such clauses, referred to as resumptive post-modification (RPM) (author’s term), may refer back and summarise the relevant preceding content of the discourse, while the element following the relational verb provides the “specifics”, or “realisation”, of the SN. The SN/RPM phenomenon is illustrated in the chapter by means of examples drawn from a corpus of academic discourse, although the study is not a quantitative one.