A Contrastive Study On Cause-Effect Expressions In Chinese And American MA Theses Of Linguistics

Cause-effect relationship is one of the four basic logic relationships.Cause-effect expressions play a significant role in the theses of Chinese postgraduates majoring in English linguistics.Proper use of cause-effect expressions could make language coherent and logical,as well as enhance the persuasion in English MA thesis.Although many researchers have conducted researches into causal conjunctions that could express cause-effect relationships,few researches have tried to study the use of some nouns and verbs that can be used to express cause-effect relationships.The author compiles two corpora:Chinese MA theses of linguistics corpus(CTLC)and American MA theses of linguistics corpus(ATLC)and probes into cause-effect expressions used by Chinese English learners and native speakers in their MA theses through qualitative and quantitative analysis,which covers the frequency distribution,positional distribution,collocation,and semantic prosody.The results of this study are as follows:(1)Generally speaking,Chinese postgraduates majoring in English linguistics tend to use more cause-effect expressions than English native postgraduates do.As for the distribution of semantic relationships,Chinese postgraduates majoring in English linguistics tend to overuse nouns but underuse verbs to express cause-effect relationship compared with English native postgraduates.(2)As for the positional features,both the Chinese postgraduates of English linguistics and English native postgraduates have a stronger tendency to put causal adverbs in initial positions,and they have a propensity for using the causal conjuncts and causal prepositional phrases in final positions.(3)From the aspects of collocation and semantic prosody of nouns(effect,result)and verbs(cause,lead to)used to express cause-effect relationship,compared with English native postgraduates,Chinese postgraduates of English linguistics tend to use typical collocates with vague meanings and these collocations have less diversity.The reasons behind this phenomenon may be due to the negative transfer of mother tongue;and Chinese postgraduates majoring in English linguistics may not have enough knowledge of accurate usages of cause-effect expressions.