A Corpus-based Study Of The Positioning Of Concessive Adverbial Clause In Academic English

The adverbial clause can be positioned either before or after the main clause.There has been a growing concern about the conditioning factors of adverbial clauses in the field of cognitive linguistics abroad.Although previous research has revealed that the positioning of the subordinate clause depends on a number of factors such as semantics,discourse-pragmatics and cognitive processing,to date,few studies have assessed the multiple effects of these factors on the positioning of concessive adverbial clauses led by subordinators although and though.Against this backdrop,this thesis,based on the British Academic Written English(BAWE)corpus,seeks to examine the conditioning factors of the positioning of the concessive adverbial clauses led by two different subordinators although and though used by native British graduates and undergraduates in academic writing.This study collected all the 2481 concessive clauses with the subordinators of although and though from two broad disciplinary groups of the arts and humanities(AH),physical sciences(PS)in BAWE,a corpus of essays written by native English speakers.A binary logistic regression was conducted to determine the conditioning factors for the positioning of although and though subordinators.The results show that:(1)pre-posed concessive adverbial clauses markedly outnumbered post-posed ones;(2)among the several factors conditioning the positioning of concessive adverbial clauses,pragmatics,length,complexity and gender factors had significant effects,deranking and disciplinary domain being the two most important contributing factors.Theoretically,the usage-based study has confirmed that grammatical variation is subject to multiple competing factors,thus suggesting that usage-based grammar is probabilistic.On a pedagogical note,the findings of the above analysis shed light on the teaching and learning of concessive adverbial clauses.