A Study Of Conjunctive Adverbs In Modern English

Adverb is a large class of English words, and its'use is a major difficulty for Chinese students, not to mention conjunctive adverbs. Conjunctive adverbs are those adverbs that have correlative functions in the sentence and texts. However, only a few studies give an account of some particular ones. Besides, the research both at home and abroad hasn't had an in-depth and systematic study. Based on the theoretical analysis, the related research methodology and corpus collected, this thesis focuses on the study of conjunctive adverbs in written discourse of modern English. The study carries on syntactic characteristics, semantic analyses as well as textual functions with theoretical and authentic data analysis.In the aspect of syntactic characteristics, the present study provides the role and the position of conjunctive adverbs. Furthermore, by using a lot of examples taken from corpus collected, a more detailed classification is proposed both in semantic analysis and in its semantic orientation. Last but not least, the further research is on its textual functions, among which each function is studied extensively and given detailed interpretation with examples.The aim of this research is to help the readers have a better understanding of conjunctive adverbs in modern English from the macroscopic perspective. Moreover, the thesis is to explore the characteristics and rules of conjunctive adverbs for further English teaching and grammar learning.