Recent approaches to textual analysis often refer to two fundamental aspects for a better comprehension of translated texts: the fact that languages express different genres through representative text types; and the basic role played by cohesive devices. The paper argues that these two characteristics, which are very important to determine textuality, can be related because languages not only prefer some cohesive devices depending on the genres in question (as has been repeated) but these devices could also be related to the text type used as a prototype of that genre. The analysis consists of a contrastive study of how grammatical cohesion devices function in expositive texts (genre: scientific essay) in four languages: Spanish, French, Catalan and English, in order to validate some assumptions that can be relevant to translation.