A Contrastive Studv On Markers Of Cause And Result In English Research Articles On Corporate Governance By Chinese And Native English-Speaking Scholars

Discourse markers are expressions indicating logical relations among clauses,adjacent pairs,prior or preceding information or whole passage,which do not influence the truth value or propositional meanings of discourse.Markers of cause and result refer to markers of subordinate idea units and complementary marker of main idea units respectively.In English research articles,due to different language using habits,Chinese and native English-speaking scholars show differences on function choices.This study focuses on function choices of the markers of cause and result in Corporate Governance research articles by Chinese and native English-speaking scholars in self-built corpora NESERA and CSERA.The contrastive analysis is conducted on frequencies,function choices and reasons by retrieving markers with WordSmith5.0,calculating frequencies of markers screened manually,ascertaining markers with significant frequency differences by Log-likelihood Ratio Calculation,and comparing choices of functions by corpus-based and discourse analysis methods.The study finds that Chinese scholars tend to use more simple form of markers of cause and result "so',"hence","therefore","because","as" than native speakers.For markers of cause,native speakers prefer "as" for introducing explanatory conditions,and "because" for revealing speech acts,Chinese scholars do not show significant preference.For markers of result,native speakers tend to introduce inferences,Chinese scholars prefer to convey speech acts and to emphasize justifications.Also,native speakers tend to introduce results before causes,Chinese scholars prefer the other way.The reasons for these differences are discussed including hypotaxis and parataxis,information branch structures,and cognitive and ethical modes of thinking.