A Corpus-based Study On Adverbial Connectors In The Abstracts Of Chinese Postgraduates' Theses

This thesis is a corpus based study combining quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis,aiming to reveal the ACs usage features in theses abstracts by Chinese postgraduates of science and engineering.With the concordancing tools of Antconc, Concapp and statistic software SPSS,the paper make investigation on three self established corpora for there are no corpora available for this study.The three corpora are NNS corpus—a non-native speaker corpus,which is composed of theses abstracts by postgraduates of science and engineering in Dalian Maritime University;NS corpus—native speaker corpus,which is composed of theses abstracts by native speaker postgraduates;and Chinese corpus,which is a collection of Chinese abstracts by Chinese postgraduates.The results indicate:(1) Compared with native English speakers,Chinese EFL learners tend to overuse adverbial connectors in the overall frequencies.In semantic relations,Chinese EFL learners overuse semantic categories of enumeration & addition, result/inference and transition.Moreover,they tend to overuse textual function of AC and have a strong preference for sentence initial position.(2) In the use of individual adverbial connectors,Chinese EFL learners overuse some informal adverbial connectors,but ignore some adverbial connectors which belong to formal registers for lack of register awareness. The possible reasons may be mother tongue transfer,instructions from teachers' and textbooks,learners' lack of register-awareness and lack of full understanding of some individual adverbial connectors' specific semantic meanings.The results of the thesis are expected to have some implications towards English abstracts writing and teaching research,and thus enhance teachers and students' awareness towards adverbial connectors' role in English theses abstracts writing.