A Corpus-based Study Of Adversative Connectors In The Dissertation Of Chinese English Graduates

According to Renouf (2005), corpus linguistics represents a particular approach tolinguistics, one consisting of the empirical observation and analysis ofauthentically-occurring text, both spoken and written. Corpus-based study has beenwidely applied in linguistics study to explore the collocations, syntactic structures,semantics as well as pragmatics, discourse analysis and the social cultures. The currentstudy intends to make a corpus-based study of the adversative connectors’ usage in twoself-established corpora and tries to answer the following questions: Are there anydifferences (density, variety, position etc.) of the adversative connectors’ usagesbetween Chinese English graduates and native speakers? Is there any overuse orunderuse of adversative connectors in the learner corpus? Is there any misuse ofadversative connectors in the learner corpus compared with those in the control corpusby native speakers?The learner corpus consists of29master’s theses written by29English graduatesfrom about20universities in China. All the authors are non-native speakers of Englishbut they succeeded in an extremely competitive entrance examination to becomestudents in the master program. Meanwhile, the control corpus includes24master’stheses from ProQuest-PQDT (ProQuest Dissertations&Theses), which were publishedduring2006to2013. All the appendices in each paper from both corpora were excludedin word and sentence count performed by Microsoft Word and WordSmith ToolsVersion6.As far as the adversative connectors are concerned, the following twelveadversative connectors are selected: but (coordinator), while, although, whereas, ratherthan (subordinators), though (subordinator and conjunct), however, yet, on the otherhand, nevertheless, instead, on the contrary (conjuncts). Those adversative connectorswhich appeared in the quotations and references were excluded during the count.Moreover, only adversative meanings of the connectors were included. That is to say,collocations like but also, nothing but, have nothing to do but, but for, as though, wouldrather than, instead of and however serious were excluded. The overall frequency and the context of each connector were counted by WordSmith Tools version6.Based on both the quantitative and the qualitative study, there are two majorfindings. Firstly, as a group, Chinese English graduates, compared to their counterparts,were found to slightly underuse connectors when the analysis was based upon both theword-level and sentence-level. Secondly, syntactic and semantic mistakes werecommon. Negative transfer and lack of semantic knowledge as well as syntacticknowledge led to those misuses. Besides, Chinese English learners felt disposed towrite illogical sentences and could not vary the adversative connectors’ usage.The study has the following pedagogical implications:1) It is important tounderline more how to use adversative connectors, placing emphasis on examining theiruse in authentic materials;2) Negative transfer should be avoided by informing studentsof the syntactic differences as well as semantic differences between two similaradversative connectors and more exercises are needed;3) Detailed description ofconnector usage should be provided in the dictionaries.