A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of The Use Of Logical Connectives In Written And Spoken English

Logical connective (or discourse mark by some researchers) is the linking unit for expressing various logical relations between sentences or clauses. It is one of the common language phenomena in English. According to the cohesion theory by Halliday and Hasan, logical connectives can help make explicit those coherence relations within a text and recovery of such coherence relations is essential for comprehension. In recent years, this topic has received increasingly interest. Much work has done on the use and acquisition of logical connectives by native English speakers. Little attention is paid to the use and acquisition of logical connectives by ESL learners. Furthermore, in the limited number of studies on ESL learners' use and acquisition of logical connectives, the focus has been on writing. Little has been done on speaking. The present study attempts to fill this gap.This dissertation is on the basis of two corpora: British National Corpus (BNC) and Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL). By making full use of a powerful corpus processing package Wordsmith Tools and Chi-square test, the study makes a comparison in the using of logical connectives both in written English and spoken English between these two corpora. The dissertation aims to explore the similarities and differences between Chinese English learners and the native English speakers in using logical connectives both in written English and spoken English . It also aims to find out the improvements that could be made for Chinese English learners as well.The data of this study shows that there are many similarities and differences between Chinese English learners and the native English speaker in using logical connectives. Moreover, Chinese students are closer to native speakers in the use of logical connectives in written English than in spoken English. Some reasons are discussed in this dissertation. Limitations for this study and suggestions for further research are also mentioned in this dissertation.