A Contrastive Study Of Explicit Cause-consequence Relations In Academic Journal Articles

The cause-consequence relation belongs to one kind of clause relation. It is oftensignaled by various cause-consequence discourse markers (DMs), such as because, so,thus, etc. Therefore, the current research mostly focuses on cause-consequencerelations signaled by discourse markers, or explicit cause-consequence relations. Thecause-consequence relation can be further divided into different sub-categories bydifferent researchers. Halliday and Hasan (1976) propose four types ofcause-consequence relation, which are causal relations (including general andspecific), reversed causal relations, conditional relations, and respective relations.Like other types of clause relations for their recognition, discourse markers are thetools to investigate cause-consequence relation. Quite a large amount of researchwork has been conducted on DMs, but not much is associated with clause relationsand less still with the features of cause-consequence relations in a particular writinggenre.In this paper, cause-consequence DMs are studied in academic journal articles.30articles are chosen as the material for this investigation. Of the30articles,10ofthem are from Linguistics Journal which is written by native speakers;10fromChinese Journal of Applied Linguistic written by nonnative English speakers;10fromJournal of China Languages in Chinese. By analyzing semantic features andfrequency distribution of cause-consequence DMs, cause-consequence relation isidentified. The frequency distribution of various cause-consequence relations isfinally obtained so as to summarize features of cause-consequence relations used inacademic journal articles.The research result shows that there are altogether553places ofcause-consequence relation occurrences in the30academic journal articles, whichsuggests that cause-consequence relation is a very commonly used in academicwritings. The distribution of the four types of cause-consequence relation shows thatthe causal and reversed causal relation are the most widely used cause-consequencerelation in academic writings, accounting for more than90%of allcause-consequence relations concerned, while conditional and reversed polarity arerarely employed in articles. English, interlanguage and Chinese articles use fairly thesame number of cause-consequence relation. However, the most distinctive differencelies in the usage of DMs, causal relation and reversed causal relation in cause-consequence relation.The analysis and research results of the present thesis also suggest some waysand advices to cause-consequence DMs and cause-consequence relation teaching andlearning for EFL learners and English teachers.