| Subordinators, one of the major connectives for linking clauses, play an important role in text cohesion and coherence, and have been a focus of many studies. However, most researchers investigated subordinators as part of the connectives. To address this gap of research, a detailed investigation on subordinators as an individual grammatical function is conducted in the present study.This research aims to investigate the tendency in Chinese non-English majors' use of subordinators as compared with native English speakers and explore the possible factors leading to the tendency.Methodologically, this research is a corpus-based study combining quantitative and qualitative analysis. ST3 and ST4, two sub-corpora of CLEC, are selected to stand for the writing of Chinese non-English majors in the present study, and BROWN, as the comparative corpus, stands for the writing of native English speakers. First of all, the comparison of overall frequencies of subordinators among ST3, ST4 and BROWN is undertaken, which provides a general tendency of Chinese non-English majors' use of subordinators. Then, a comparison of top ten frequently used subordinators among these corpora is made and the most overused and underused subordinators are investigated as well in order to discover the underlying factors leading to the tendency.The present study reveals that there is a general tendency for Chinese non-English majors to overuse subordinators, while some subordinators are underused. The investigation into the deviant use of subordinators uncovers some influencing factors leading to the tendency: Firstly, Chinese non-English majors have incomplete understanding of the semantic properties and parts of speech of subordinators. Secondly, Chinese non-English majors lack stylistic awareness in the use of subordinators. Finally, language transfer influences Chinese non-English majors' mastery and use of subordinators. Based on the above findings, some pedagogical suggestions are offered.
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