A Corpus-based Study On Contrastive Connectors

This thesis is a corpus-based study on the use of contrastive connectors by Chinese non-English majors through comparison between learner corpus (St3 and St4, subcorpora of Chinese Learners English Corpus) and native speaker corpus (BROWN). With a series of computation and tests by Wordsmith and SPSS, this thesis examines the overall distribution and frequencies of contrastive connectors in LC and BROWN. The results reveal that there is significant difference in the frequencies of contrastive connectors between the two corpora. Compared with native speakers, Chinese non-English majors use more contrastive connectors with fewer types. The overuse of some informal contrastive connectors and underuse of some formal connectors indicate the learners' lack of register-awareness. For the prepositional tendencies of the adverbial contrastive connectors and prepositional contrastive connectors, Chinese non-English majors have a preference of initial position. Furthermore, errors committed by learners are also analyzed and the incorrect utilization of contrastive connectors is attributed to mother tongue interference and incomplete application of rules and logical-semantic confusion.