Analysis Of Adversatives In Learners' MA Thesis Introduction

The purpose of Introductions is to present the content of the text and arouse the interests of the readers.And most of them follow Swales' CARS model to compare the current situation of the research field with the current research and demonstrate the necessity of current research.Linking adverbials,as one of the means of logical or semantic relations between units of cohesive discourse,its proper use can improve the coherence and clarity of discourse and achieve the purpose of effective communication.Among them,adversatives are the more common research objects in English writing.It is mostly used in the introductory part to compare the research results in this field,to find out the gap between current research and previous research,to put forward new arguments and to demonstrate the significance of the current research.At present,most of the studies are based on the quantitative analysis of the entire discourse to describe the overall use of adversatives features and less concerned about individual vocabulary.Therefore,this study compares the learners' English academic papers with the introduction corpora and the international journal articles' quotations corpus.The questions examined include:(1)What are the frequency and distribution features of adversatives in IMA and IIJA?(2)What are the semantic and functional features of adversatives in each moves?The specific research steps are as follows:(1)To confirm the 9 adversatives examined in this article.(2)Use Wordsmith5.0 software to extract the index lines of adversatives one by one in two corpora respectively,and manually exclude the index lines which are not used as concatenation.(3)Using the chi-square test and the log-likelihood calculation tool to test the frequency of adversatives in the two corpora,and analyze the use of high frequency adversatives.The study finds that:1)Chinese MA students use less adversatives in their academic articles than professional writers.2)Adversatives with more concession and contrast relations are more used in each move.They are mainly used to compare previous researches,discover gaps in research,determine new research perspectives,state the current research value and significance,realize the discourse cohesion and highlight themes.And the semantic complexity of adversatives increases the difficulty for learners to learn and use.It is suggested that learners focus on the subtle semantic and functional differences of adversatives in their studies.