A Study Of Linking Adverbials In Chinese EFL Learners' International Journal Articles

Linking adverbials are those adverbials that serve to connect two stretches of discourse(Biber et al.,1999: 558).Understanding the use of these adverbials is very important in language use and learning,especially in second language acquisition.This study explored the use of linking adverbial in Chinese EFL learners' International journal articles to provide some reference for English academic writing in second language acquisition.Two research questions have been addressed:(1)What is the frequency of linking adverbials used by Chinese EFL learners?(2)What are the preferences of linking adverbials used by Chinese EFL learners?And what are the causes for these preferences?Interlanguage analysis is adopted as theoretical basis in the present study to treat these preferences as neutral language facts to reveal the features of EFL learners' language.The observed corpus CNS is build with 50 SSCI journal articles written by Chinese EFL learners from 2011 to 2016,and the reference corpus ENS by English native speakers(452160 vs.548358 words).The findings of the present study are as follows:1)As for the frequency,generally,Chinese EFL learners tend to use more linking adverbials than native speakers and share a similar semantic distribution with native speakers.They tend to use more linking adverbials in every category,but less in adversative category.2)As for the preferences,Chinese EFL learners tend to avoid the collocation of negative meaning words with linking adverbials.They prefer to overly collocate modal verbs with addictive and causal/resultative linking adverbials.And adversative and causal/resultative linking adverbials are more likely put in the sentence-initial.The over-emphasis of linking adverbials in EFL training,the transfer of source language Chinese and learners' preferences for familiar linking adverbials are the three causes for Chinese EFL learners' preference.