A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Native And Non-native Use Of Discourse Connectives In Academic Writings

In the past few years, the application of computerized corpora has greatly facilitated the research with an attempt to investigating the differences that may exist between native speakers and Chinese learners in utilizing discourse connectives, a group of very important linguistic resources in discourse interpretation suggested both by coherence and relevance theory. However, apart from their inconsistent conclusions and various limitations with their experimental design analyses, the past research can't help leaving an impression that they were merely making frequency counting and comparing and didn't conduct more thorough qualitative analysis beyond the basic quantitative analysis.Thus, with a view to overcoming the existing limitations with the previous studies, the current work has constructed two computerized corpora containing authentic native and Chinese learners' writings respectively to facilitate both of its qualitative and quantitative research. By making full use of a powerful corpus processing package Wordsmith Tools and a Chi-square test, the present study started with an initial quantitative analysis. The major findings are: learners tend to supply more discourse connectives in their English writings than native speakers; learners have a similar tendency with native speakers in the selection of the most frequently used connectives and different groups of connectives; a Chi-square test demonstrates that learners display a stronger tendency in employing the enumative, summative and distractive connectives and a group of inferential connectives within the causal category as compared with native speakers. Then a further qualitative analysis of the context reveals that learners' overuse of connectives involve mechanical use, excessive use, ambiguous use and misuse of discourse connectives. Besides, learners are not quite capable of spontaneously supplying some formal connectives in their academic writings as compared with native speakers. And two additional case studies on and and but also show that learners are lack of a sufficient flexibility in using them to express various sentential relations. Finally, the possible underlying reasons for differences between the native and non-native use have been analyzed and some tentative suggestions for teaching practice in this field have been suggested.