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1. Introduction
In discourse comprehension, if all goes well, people tend to create a rich and coherent mental representation of the events described in the text. Halliday and Hasan (1976) claim that most people have the natural ability to determine whether a succession of sentences is a coherent text or an accidental collection of unconnected pieces. Anaphoric associations, the use of a word or a phrase to refer to previously mentioned antecedents in the text, and semantic relations, the logical or rhetorical connections between adjacent textual segments, are two crucial phenomena in the process of constructing a mental coherent representation of the text being read. Pronominal co-referential pointers and discourse connectives are linguistic devices whose function is to guide the building of this representation, thus helping the comprehender to invest less cognitive resources in reading tasks.
As is well known, referential and relational coherence relations have been explored profoundly (Brown-Schmidt, Byron, & Tanenhaus, 2005; Cornish, 1999; Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Hogeweg & de Hoop, 2015; Prandi, 2004; Reinhart, 1981; Rysová & Rysová, 2018; Sanders, Spooren, & Noordman, 1992, 1993; Spooren & Sanders, 2008; van Gompel, 2013). On the one hand, third person gendered and numbered pronouns or co-referential anaphoric personal links have been studied extensively from diverse perspectives and with focus on an important number of variables (e.g., Asher, 1993; Cornish, 1996, 2008; Ehrlich, 1980). Particular attention has been devoted to the distance of the preceding antecedent (e.g., Carpenter & Just, 1977; Çokal, Sturt, & Ferreira, 2018; Duffy & Rayner, 1990; Ehrlich & Rayner, 1983; Fukumura & van Gompel, 2012), and to the gender and syntactic ambiguity that may arise in some contexts (Kennison, 2003; Kennison, Fernandez, & Bowers, 2009; Kennison & Trofe, 2003; Sturt, 2003, 2013). At the same time, causal and counter-argumentative semantic inter-sentential relations have also been studied intensely from different theoretical perspectives and with differing methodological techniques (Köhne & Demberg, 2013; Morera, León, Escudero, & de Vega, 2017; Parodi, Julio, & Recio, 2018; Prandi, 2004; Recio, Nadal, & Loureda, 2018; Sanders et al., 1992, 1993; Xu, Chen, Panther, & Wu, 2018; Zunino, 2017). Yet, rarely do studies center on them together focusing on the binary procedural instruction they provide to the reader (referential and relational), particularly from a distinctive discourse-oriented approach...