222 Kerstin Kunz and Erich Steiner
Tun and machen establish lexical cohesion through the sense relationship of hypo-
nymy between their general action verb meaning and their lexically subordinate
hyponyms. For non-action verb types, several different cohesive devices may be
employed in German, such as a nominal substitution, demonstrative pronouns,
ellipsis and types of lexical cohesion:
(51a) Peters Haus ist eingestürzt. Das ist auch mit meinem passiert./Meines auch.
(52) He thought he recognised the twisted thorn trees, and might indeed have
done so. [EO_FICTION]
Es wollte ihm scheinen, als erkenne er die krummen Weißdornbäume wieder,
und das mochte sich durchaus so verhalten, [GTRANS_FICTION]
(53) Zwei von uns haben nun doch in ein Gespräch gefunden; kein Wunder, daß
es vor dem riesigen Kühlschrank geschehen ist. [GO_FICTION]
Two of our number have now struck up a conversation after all. No wonder
they did so in front of the huge refrigerator, [ETRANS_FICTION]
All relevant instances of tun or machen in the German corpora are combined with
the morphologically invariable demonstrative pronouns das or dies:
(54) Jeder zweite Unternehmer, der sich für die Gesellschaft engagiert, tut dies im
sozialen Bereich, ... [GO_ESSAY]
One in two businessmen working for the good of society is involved in social
work, ... [GTRANS_ESSAY]
In (54), the adverbial im sozialen Bereich in the second clause further specifies the
domain of action described by the action verb sich engagieren in the first clause.
The translation employs a more specific verb for lexical cohesion.2.2.3 Clausal substitution
The item so (negative not) in English is employed for substituting propositions, its
scope not including mood and modality features of the antecedent clause:
(55) Is John coming to the party tomorrow? I don’t believe so.
The main verbs in the follow-up clauses seem to be restricted to a small group
of reported speech, state and mental verbs (see Quirk et al. 1985: 880ff ). Beyond
these three process-types, clausal substitution is frequent with modalized (so may/
must/will...) and conditional (if so...) follow-up clauses (Halliday & Hasan 1976:
134f ) – all of which are cases in which scoping over whole propositions is at stake.
In German, propositions of preceding sentences are often referred to by
demonstrative pronouns, or else substituted by (registerially restricted) ellipsis
or nicht.