A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Causal Links

Causality plays an essential role in written English in that it makes the language coherent and logical. In this paper, in order to study the use of causality among non-native speakers, the author has conducted a corpus-based study by exploring a learner corpus (CLEC) and a native corpus (LOB). The present study focuses on the interlanguage of Chinese EFL learners as a whole and examined the use of the causal links. It has been found that Chinese EFL learners differ a lot from native speakers in the use of causal links, that is, causal linking adverbials, causal prepositional linkages, causal subordinating conjunctions and clause-integrated linkages. The author attempts to offer some possible explanations to the inappropriateness found in Chinese learners'use of causal links as well as some pedagogical implications of the study.