Investigation Into The Use Of Temporal Adverbials In The Narrative Articles Of The Present NSEC Textbook

In daily life, we usually need to denote when an action or a state occurs. Sometimes, weshould also have to describe the time relationship between two events or show the timefeatures of an action. Therefore, much more attention should be attached to time. Time is socommon in our daily life that any man in any country has the concept of time in the past,present and future. It is one of the most important parts in human’s cognitive structure.Usually, Time can be represented by certain devices in all languages in spite of the culturaldifferences. And natural languages usually express time by the means of lexical device.Moreover, temporal adverbials, as one form of lexical device, widely exist in all languagesand can convey much richer temporal meanings than any other means (Klein,1994).Therefore, temporal adverbials are the basic way to express time and have been favored byscholars. However, when checking students’ compositions, we found that temporal adverbialsin their passages are the most common ones, so simple and lack of diversity. In addition,complex structures of temporal adverbials are rarely used in students’compositions.So far, in terms of the content, studies on temporal adverbials at home and abroad aremainly concentrated on three levels: the syntactic level, the discourse level and the level ofsecond language acquisition, through which positions of temporal adverbials in sentences andthe textual functions are examined, and the features of temporal adverbials in EFL learners’compositions are described. With regard to the research approaches, the corpus-basedapproach and the contrastive analysis are frequently adopted by scholars to make a contrastbetween the EFL learners’ corpus and the native speakers’ corpus. However, this kind ofcomparison is just conducted on the features of commonly used temporal adverbials, mainly exploring whether some words are over used or not. Furthermore, Grabe (2002) argued thattemporal adverbials more frequently appear in narrative articles than in argumentative essays.Namely, the use of temporal adverbials changes in different kind of genres, so the discoursetype should be taken into consideration when temporal adverbials are examined. Yet it is notdifficult to find out that few researches can do like that.In view of this, the author selected44narrative articles from Student’s Books of NewSenior English for China (NSEC) and built a small-size corpus with22404words. Based onthe genre theory, the current research is conducted to explore the features of linguisticstructures and semantic functions of temporal adverbials in narrative articles in the NSECtextbook, trying to build a model for students to imitate and giving some implications forEnglish language teaching and learning. The research questions are listed as below:(1) In terms of the linguistic forms, what are the characteristics of temporal adverbials innarrative articles in the NSEC textbook? How many types and what are the distributions?(2) In terms of the semantic functions, what are the characteristics of temporaladverbials in narrative articles in the NSEC textbook? What are the temporal meanings thateach type can express?The findings reveals that a large number of variable temporal adverbials is used innarrative articles in the NSEC textbook:1) in view of the linguistic forms, except for thesingle adverbs and single nouns, some complex forms are also used like non-finite clausesand verbless clauses; adverb phrases are the most common form with the highest percentageof39.0%while noun phrases are the lowest with percentage of10.2%;2) in view of thesemantic functions, temporal adverbials in narrative articles in the NSEC textbook canexpress rich temporal meanings. All the four types of temporal meanings put forward byQuirk (1985) can be expressed, among which adverb phrases, noun phrases, prepositionalphrases and clauses can fulfill meanings of point in time, duration and frequency, but onlyadverb phrases and prepositional phrases can fulfill the semantic function of time relationship.On the basis of the findings, several implications for teachers and students are derivedfrom the present research: firstly, English teacher should introduce the features of thenarrative genre and help learners grasp the features of narrative discourses; secondly, English teacher should introduce the knowledge of temporal adverbials, provide numerous temporaladverbials, examples and enough writing practice; thirdly, English teacher should encouragestudents to form the habit of collecting patterns of temporal adverbials.