A Corpus-based Study Of Connectives In English Abstracts In ISEP

One way of achieving coherence is to signal logical or semantic relations between units of discourse by means of connectives. However, a number of studies have shown that the use of connectives is problematic for language learners, in particular foreign language learners. Studies at home and abroad shed light on the way of learners'use of connectives but few researches have been carried out to investigate the advanced ESL learners'use of connectives, more specifically, the Chinese advanced learners'behavior of connective use. The present study aims to fill in this gap and investigate the use of connectives in English abstracts in International Science and Engineering Periodicals (ISEP) written by advanced Chinese learners and native English writers. Our main purpose is to provide an understanding of the normative use of connectives as demonstrated in native writers'writings. The present study mainly addresses the following questions:1. Do advanced Chinese learners use connectives to the same extent as native English speakers in the abstracts?2. Do they use their connectives to express the same semantic relations as native speakers?3. What are the most frequently used connectives in NNS corpus and NS corpus respectively?4. Do they place them in the same positions as native English speakers?5. Do they choose stylistically appropriate connectives?In order to answer the above questions, we established two corpora first: the corpus of abstracts written by Chinese advanced learners, (i.e. NNS corpus) and the corpus of abstracts written by native English speakers (i.e. NS corpus), both of which were composed of abstracts in ISEP. We have selected 33 kinds of periodicals, the main spheres of which are science and engineer, including physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer, technology and etc. The authors'identities have been checked carefully with the help of the authors'information provided by the editors. As for the NNS corpus, only those articles written by authors who have typical Chinese names...