Intuitively all users of language understand whether a unit of discourse is cohesive, whether it makes sense. Markels seeks to formalize some of this innate knowledge about discourse by describing some of the textual cues that contribute to cohesion in particular types of English paragraphs. Focusing on expository paragraphs, she investigates the semantic relations among nouns necessary to create noun chains and the syntactic information necessary to invest those chains with cohesion. Other researchers have investigated cohesion only as a semantic phenomenon, but by pursuing this new...