Signposts for the reader: A corpus-based study of text deixis

This paper presents the results of a pilot study on the occurrence of text deixis in a number of texts taken from the Lancaster/Oslo-Bergen Corpus ofBritish English. Text deixis refers to those expressions that we use either to teil the reader his or her location, e.g. in a chapter, section or paragraph, or to direct the reader to anotherpart ofthe same text. It was found that a distinction may be made between narrative and nonnarrative texts. The former do not contain text deixis, while the latter are sub-divided into groups on the basis of the frequency of occurrence of text deixis.