Distributions And Motivations Of Zero Conjunction In English Written Texts

Cohesion and coherence is a popular issue in the field of discourse analysis. Acoherent discourse always employs certain cohesive device, such as ellipsis or conjunction.However, there exists an interesting linguistic phenomenon in actual language use. That is"zero conjunction", which can link two sentences as well. Some scholars had noticed thiscohesive device. However, the study of "zero conjunction" is not so much. Thus it isnecessary and significant to do research to explore it. Zero conjunction is the concern ofthis thesis. Rather, the study reported in this thesis mainly investigates the distributions andmotivations of zero conjunction in English written texts.Forty articles of narration, description, exposition and argumentation were selected,ten from each genre. Most of them are from the magazines of English Salon, and EnglishLanguage Learning published in the year 2004 and 2005. There are two purposes toachieve in this paper. One is to explore whether the logical-semantic relation brought byzero conjunction has anything to do with genres, by means of counting the percentage of"zero conjunction" in each genre. And if it does, it will achieve to what extent. The otherpurpose is to discover motivations, which may cause "zero conjunction" in texts ofdifferent genres. After examining the samples, the thesis concludes that: (1) genres are sensitive to usingzero conjunction, which indicates that the requirement of zero conjunction is varied fromgenre to genre;(2) the motivations of zero conjunction found in this thesis, by far, aregenre preference, punctuation marks, and the least effort principle. In the conclusion part, the pedagogical significance of this thesis is pointed out on theone hand;and its limitation, on the other hand. Zero conjunction can be regarded as alinguistic feature, which can be applied to the teaching of language writing.