A Comparable Corpus-based Study Of Adverbial Connectives In English Scientific Papers Written By Chinese Scholars

Nowadays, the focus of linguistic study has been shifted from the level of sentence to discourse. Adverbial connectives signal the logic relationships between sentences. By virtue of adverbial connectives, the readers figure out the complex logic relations in discourse effectively and also predict the text structure. In this way, learning adverbial connectives are crucial in English learning. However, lots of studies show that the English learners have difficulties in applying those adverbial connectives. Most of the previous studies try to find out the characteristics of the English learners in China, but few of them probe into the causes leading to such characteristics. With the hope of exploring the similarities and differences in using adverbial connectives between the Chinese scholars and the native English scholars, this thesis employs a comparable corpus-based approach and carries out a contrastive analysis in their academic papers. In addition, this thesis will try to use some theories concerning the Second Language Acquisition (SLA for short) to explain the characteristics of English scientific writings by the Chinese scholars. The study explores the following questions:1) What are the similarities and differences in the use of adverbial connectives between the Chinese scholars and the native English scholars in their academic papers?2) How can some theories concerning SLA explain the performances of the Chinese scholars in using adverbial connectives?This research uses two comparable corpora as the data sources. One is Chinese scholars corpus (CSC for short), the other is English native speaker corpus (NSC for short). All the contents of the two corpora come from the Chinese and the native English scholars’ academic papers published in ecological economy journals. The findings of the thesis are:1) The distribution of different semantic types is roughly the same between the two corpora. However, the Chinese scholars rely more on the most frequently used adverbial connectives. In addition, their performances on using corroboration adverbial connectives, formal adverbial connectives, and the variety of their sentences patterns are far from satisfaction. 2) The SLA theories such as language transfer, Connectionism, Spread Activation Theory, Duel-Encoding Theory, and Noticing Theory tell us that the different natures between Chinese and English, the insufficient inputs of the target languages, and the limited notice on adverbial connectives are the main causes of the disparities mentioned above.The study sheds light on the characteristics of the Chinese scholars in using adverbial connectives in the academic papers and investigates the underlying causes. It is believed that this thesis will benefit the advanced English learners to improve their ability on the use of adverbial connectives.