| Conjunctions, as one way of achieving cohesion in English, play an essential rolein structuring the discourse and indicating logico-semantical relationships betweenlanguage elements. A correct understanding and appropriate use of conjunctions notonly contribute to the cohesion and coherence of speakers' oral production, but alsoconstruct a natural and fluent speech, thus facilitating comprehensible and on-goingcommunication. A number of previous researches have shown that the use ofconjunctions is problematic for Chinese English learners with its uniquecharacteristics, but they are mainly focused on written discourse and few on spokendiscourse. Therefore, this thesis employs a corpus-based approach and conducts acomprehensive contrastive interlanguage analysis of Chinese English majors' use ofconjunctions in spoken discourse. The present study aims to explore the similaritiesand differences between Chinese learners and native speakers in order to provide anunderstanding of the normative use of conjunctions demonstrated in native speakers'oral production.The data resources used in this study are retrieved form the sub-corpus ofSpoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese learners (SWECCL) and sub-corpusof British National Corpus (BNC).The classification of conjunctions is based onQuirk et al's framework of taxonomy, combining with Halliday's classification.Through the retrieval software of Antconc3.2.1and BNC Indexer, the distinctivefeatures and differences on overall frequencies, semantic distribution, positionaldistribution and lexical frequencies distribution of all the conjunctions betweenChinese English majors and native speakers are uncovered. Then the author tries toexplore in-depth reasons hidden behind these differences.The major findings show that, firstly, Chinese English majors display a generaltendency to overuse conjunctions in their oral production in terms of total tokens, andthere is a significant difference between the two spoken corpora. It indicates that they have the awareness of using more conjunctions to create cohesion and coherence ofdiscourse. Secondly, the study of semantic distribution displays great differencebetween two groups of speakers, from which we find that Chinese learners are proneto overuse the listing and resultive semantic categories. But they underuse verifactiveconjunctions which reflect the speakers' personal convictions. Thirdly, in terms ofpositional distribution, Chinese English majors' are prone to put more conjunctions inthe medial position and less in final position, which shows Chinese advanced learnerhave some knowledge about the norm of the positions' placement of conjunctions.But they have a strong tendency to place more conjunctions in the initial position,which can be attributed to the influence of Chinese thinking pattern. Lastly, thedistribution of lexical frequencies is demonstrated from two aspects in the two spokencorpora: the top ten frequently used conjunctions between Chinese English majorsand native speakers, conjunctions overused and underused by Chinese English majors.Through analysis, we find that both groups of speakers depend heavily on the top tenconjunctions but Chinese English majors rely heavily on them, which shows that thelearners lack sensitivity to the variety of conjunctions. In addition, among theoverused conjunctions, Chinese English majors tend to avoid informal conjunctionsand replace them by formal ones, which indicates that they display a lack of registerawareness. While among the underused conjunctions, they adopt "avoidance strategy"to certain verifactive conjunctions.The application of corpus-based authentic data in the present study have revealedthe problems that Chinese English majors have in the use of conjunctions in their oralproduction, shedding some light on the future learning and teaching. What's moreimportant, this study may be beneficial to Chinese English majors to deepenunderstanding on the appropriate way of using conjunctions in spoken utterance. |
PDF Full Text Request