A Comparative Study On The Use Of Logical Connectives In Academic Writing

Logical connectives (abbreviated for LCs) play an important role in English writing as key devices fortextual cohesion which “enable the speakers to organize what he is saying in such a way that it makes sensein the context and fulfills its function as a message”(Halliday&Hasan,2001). Previous researches on LCsusage in learners’ writing found that it is problematic for the learners to use LCs appropriately. Amongthese researches, most of them are based on short essays written by undergraduates, only a few on EFLlearners’ academic writing. On account of this, the present study is conducted to explore how LCs used byChinese English-major postgraduates in their MA theses based on the self-build corpora of MA theses andinternational journal articles.The research questions of this present study are as follows:(1) What are the frequency features of LCsin the two corpora of MA theses and international journal articles?(2) What are the features of top tenfrequently used LCs in the two corpora?(3) What are the semantic distribution features of LCs and theirspecific features in using within each semantic relation?The First step is corpus collection. Two corpora with less than six hundred thousand tokens are builtfor the purposes of research. The learner corpus contains42applied linguistics MA theses and the referencecorpus is composed of72journal articles of applied linguistics. The second step is LCs identification. Thepresent study takes LCs provided by Hyland (2000) into research and categorizes them referring to mainlythe framework given both by Halliday&Hasan,(1976) and Biber et al.(2000). Step three is corpusconcordancing. The raw frequency of LCs is calculated by entering each LC at a time in AntConc3.3.5wwith the help of the function of wordlist, and concordance lines can be extracted with the help of thefunction of concordance for qualitative analysis. The last step is data analysis. This study takes quantitativeanalysis of LCs with the help of Chi-square Test used for processing data and qualitative analysis based onoriginal context information.The major findings are:(1) On the whole, Chinese English-major postgraduates tend to overuse LCswith significance of using difference in their MA these.(2) There are great similarities on the use of top ten most frequently used LCs between two groups of writers: nine are found identical in the two corpora, andthe top five rank the same as well, which shows that the learners used these LCs roughly the same as theprofessional writers in their academic writings.(3) As to semantic distribution, both of the two groups ofwriters use additive LCs the most; causal LCs are used roughly the same between the two groups accordingto significance in using difference; postgraduate learners are inclined to overuse additive LCs whileunderuse adversative LCs significantly. A specific analysis of LCs within each semantic category indicatesthat: learners tend to overuse and underuse some specific LCs significantly with the explanation that theoveruse is mainly caused by misuse such as the overused LCs and and besides while the underuse is leadedby learners’ lack of stylistic awareness and the overuse of other simple LCs.The present study shows that Chinese English-major postgraduates have some similarities withprofessional writers in the use of LCs, which can indicates these learner’s propriety of using to a certaindegree；however, in the use of some specific LCs, learners have a long way to go to reach proficiency ofprofessional writers. Proposal in further teaching and writing of academic English is that more attentionshould be paid in raising stylistic awareness and the proper use of some specific LCs.