A Corpus-based Study Of Causal Connectives In Financial Academic Papers

Causal connectives are one of the four basic logical relationships(Halliday &Hasan,1976),therefore whether causal connectives can be used appropriately,plays an important role in the logic and fluency of academic papers.During the writing of academic papers,causality can mainly be expressed by a series of causal connectives to accurately convey the semantic and logical relationship between sentences or paragraphs.Existing research on the causal connectives is mainly concentrated on the expression of causal relationships,comparison on the use of Chinese and foreign words,and the coherence functional analysis of causal connectives.Though causal connectives in professional economic academic papers,has not yet been reviewed.Particularly in recent years,as China pays more attention to economic development,many scholars have gradually begun to try to publish professional papers on China's financial development in leading academic journals around the world.But due to their limited language and knowledge of expressions,few Chinese scholars are being published at present.Based on this,from a linguistic point of view,this paper undertakes a systematic analysis of current high-level financial academic papers on the causal relationships,so as to provide some ideas and help for Chinese scholars.This paper builds on the "financial academic papers corpus" by author,and uses computer intelligent retrieving tools,together with manual work.The next step is by combining qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis to systemically study the use of causal connectives in financial academic papers.In the specific process of this research,this paper selects three financial academic journals,as the research object to study.All of the 30 pieces of data resources come from the top three financial journals in the world,i.e.Journal of Finance,Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Financial Studies.These selected papers were published during the year of 2010 to 2015;30 papers were then selected at random.All of these three magazines are SSCI search publications and are an authority in the field of finance around the world.The selected academic papers areabout 10,000 words,the subject matter relates to corporate finance,capital markets,banking finance aspects and so on.The selected discourses are of sufficient authority and representativeness in the world.This paper uses Halliday's cohesion theory as its theoretical basis,and utilises Mo Junhua's classification,to classify causal connectives in corpus.Next,AntConc is used to tag the corpus,and Excel is used to count and analyse the data that is collected.Finally,this paper uses a qualitative analysis method to explain the functions of causal connectives in financial academic papers.This paper is divided into five parts.Chapter One is an introduction.This chapter briefly introduces the research background,the significance of this research,the research questions and the organisation of this research.Chapter Two reviews relative research that has been done by linguists in foreign countries and linguists at home.Chapter Three discusses the research method of this paper.This chapter introduces the specific research method and three procedures of the research.According to the questions that are raised in Chapter One,Chapter Four makes quantitative and qualitative analysis of the use of causal connectives in corpus.Chapter Five is a conclusion.This chapter summarises the main findings of Chapter Four.Finally,the limitations of this study are listed,and some suggestions for further study are also provided in Chapter Five.The main findings of this study are: firstly,in financial academic papers,the authors prefer to choose common and easy causal connectives to express causality,in order to make readers understand the main idea easier and faster.Secondly,in English writing,people often adopt a deductive argument,and the use of conjunction(phrases)is more often used than adverbial(phrases)and prepositional(phrases).Finally,as for the position of causal connectives,conjunctive causal connectives are used more frequently at the end of a sentence,whereas,the most common position of adverbial(phrases)is at the beginning,and prepositional(phrases)occur more frequently at the end.