A Corpus-based Analysis Of Conjunctive Relations In College English Writing

Conjunction plays an essential role in the discourse as one of cohesive devices. The present study is a corpus-based research which is a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. The corpora selected for the present study are composed of two parts, namely, ST3 and ST4 in Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), and sub-corpora in British National Corpus (BNC), as the reference of native corpus, aiming to investigate the use of conjunctives in Chinese college students'writings. The research scope includes overall frequency, semantic relations, top ten frequently used conjunctives and over/underused conjunctives. Corpus analysis software is used to carry out statistical analysis of all the data. The main purpose is to enable learners to understand how the native speakers use the conjunctives in their writing as the reference for English teaching and learning.First, based on the categories of Quirk and Biber et al.'s, conjunctives are classified into seven semantic types and the author makes a list of all the conjunctives which will be investigated in the study. Next, the sub-corpora used in the research are carefully drawn from CLEC and BNC. With the help of AntConc software and BNC online search service, the frequency of each conjunctive is checked in the two corpora. At the same time, with the assistance of File View, the actual context, in which each conjunctive occurs, is also carefully examined. The cases of non-conjunctives are eliminated and the multi-semantic conjunctives are differentiated. Excel is used for noting and counting the frequency of each conjunctive. Finally, the statistical findings are analyzed and discussed. The raw data collected needs to be normalized, before conducting contrastive studies on conjunctives in the two sub-corpora. Moreover, Log-likelihood test is used to test the observed differences and find over/underused conjunctives.These findings suggest that Chinese college students have shown a general tendency to use more conjunctives in their English writings. The frequency of each semantic type demonstrates that the distribution of different semantic types is almost the same in the two sub-corpora. The Chinese EFL learners and the native English speakers have displayed great tendency of similarity in the use of the top ten most frequently used conjunctives, although their rank order differs somewhat. A Log-likelihood test shows that the Chinese EFL learners display a stronger tendency in employing the conjunctives of enumeration/addition and result/inference, while they tend to use fewer contrastive/concessive conjunctives. Chinese learners'use of some conjunctives might be the influence of the Chinese mode of thinking, the modelization of teachers'instruction, and Chinese learners'lack of stylistic awareness and so on. Some pedagogical implications in the English teaching are put forward at last.