Journal of ELT and Applied Linguistics (JELTAL) Volume 2—Issue 1, January, 2014 ISSN: 2347-6575 www.jeltal.com Page 93 Cohesion in the Abstracts of Undergraduate Dissertations: An Intra-disciplinary Study in a Ghanaian University Dr. Joseph Benjamin Archibald Afful 1 , Mark Nartey 2 Department of English, University of Cape Coast 1 , Department of Language and Literature, Norwegian University of Science and Technology 2 ABSTRACT Following the work of Santos (1996), studies on research articles and dissertation abstracts have elicited considerable attention. The present research examines grammatical cohesion in the Language and Literature abstracts of undergraduate dissertations presented to the Department of English of a public university in Ghana – the University of Cape Coast (UCC). A total of 50 abstracts (25 each from Language and Literature) constituted the data set for the study. Using mixed research design and drawing on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) influential theory of cohesion, the study points to three key findings. First, of Halliday and Hasan’s four grammatical cohesive devices (that is, conjunction, reference, substitution, and ellipses) reference and conjunction are preponderantly used. Second, the use of these grammatical devices in the Language and Literature abstracts evinces more similarities than differences. Third, although undergraduate students studying English at the University of Cape Coast do use a range of grammatical cohesive devices, they seem to lack sophistication in their use. The findings of this study have implications for pedagogy, theory, academic writing and further research. Key words: cohesion, undergraduate dissertation abstract, genre, discipline 1.0 INTRODUCTION Following Swales’ (1990) well-known publication on the introductions of research articles (RAs), interest in academic discourse among researchers in Applied Linguistics and other allied fields has garnered considerable attention. In this regard, various studies have explored the rhetorical aspects of the RA such as the acknowledgement (Giannoni, 1998), abstract (Santos, 1996; Stotesbury, 2003; Martin-Martin & Burgess, 2004), results (Brett, 1994), discussion (Holmes, 1997, 2001), conclusion (Yang & Allison, 2003), metadiscourse (Dahl, 2004), and addressee features (Hyland, 2001). Linguistic features such as subject (Gosden, 1993), collocation (Gledhill, 2000), and transitivity (Martinez, 2003) as far as the RA is concerned are also common in the extant literature. Apart from the RA, other notable forms of academic discourse include textbooks, monographs, conference proceedings, critical reviews, edited collections, festschrifts, viva voce, and theses. Of these academic genres, however, one genre which continues to engage the attention of many scholars in Applied Linguistics, generally, and English for Specific Purposes (ESP), particularly, is the dissertation/thesis. In recent times, scholars have shown deep interest in such rhetorical features of the dissertation as generic structure (Swales, 2004), acknowledgement (Hyland, 2004; Kudjordjie, 2010), introduction (Bunton, 2002), literature review (Kwan, 2006; Akindele, 2009),