A Corpus-based Study On The Positioning Of Concessive Adverbial Clauses In Chinese EFL Learners’ Language

Complex sentences in English are symbolic structures expressing the complicated relation among conceptual units. The positioning of adverbial clauses, that is, the variability of the syntagmatic sequence of subordinate clauses and main clauses, has received a great deal of attention from the realm of cognitive linguistics. It is widely recognized that iconicity is the major factor determining adverbial clauses’order, especially for causal and temporal clauses. Meanwhile, the non-iconic sequence of adverbial clauses is also motivated by a series of factors, such as parsing theory, semantic and pragmatic force. However, there is little research on the comprehensive effect brought by the above factors on the positioning of concessive adverbial clauses used by Chinese EFL learners. Thus, this paper will analyze the distributional features of concessive clauses from CLEC (Chinese Learners English Corpus). It aims to interpret the linguistic feature of concessive adverbial clauses preformed by Chinese EFL learners in a comprehensive and systematic way.After the quantitative and contrastive analyses of data collected from three corpora, the present study yields the following key findings. First, in contrast to the adverbial-final positioning in English native speakers data, we find a strong tendency of adverbial-initial positioning in Chinese EFL learners data. Second, by using logistic regression analysis, we find that iconicity of sequence, pragmatic force, and relative length, complexity all have a significant correlation with the positioning of concessive clauses in Chinese EFL learners. Moreover, the predictor of relative length is the second largest factor that affects the order of a concessive clause except iconicity of sequence. Third, Chinese EFL learners show weaker performance on the discourse coherence between the whole text and the concessive adverbial clauses in writing than English native speakers do.During the process of interpreting the positioning of concessive clauses, this thesis also tries to put forward a theoretically conceptual blending model which will be instrumental in the research of this line in combination with the key findings based on the authentic materials. At the same time, it is conductive to both Chinese EFL learners and teachers as well.