A Corpus-based Research On Conjunctions As A Grammatical Cohesive Device In CET-6 Writing

English writing has always been an essential part to reflect the level of English learners,and is a key part of large-scale exams.In writing,English conjunctions play an important role in the cohesion and coherence of the essay.Since it was established and launched in January 1990,the College English Test 6 has gradually become a major English university certificate to evaluate students’ English learning level,to measure the English learning ability of graduates in enterprises and institutions,and the whole society.The gold content of the College English Certificate VI is self-evident,and it is a powerful stepping stone for contemporary college students in job search and promotion.With the emergence of large-scale corpus and retrieval software,linguistic research methods using corpus have gradually been widely used.Based on classification about conjunctions of Halliday and Hasan as well as cohesion theory posed by Halliday,a corpus-based approach is adopted in this thesis,and 70 answer templates of the past exam papers of College English Test 6(from CET 4 and CET 6Examination Organizing Committee,HJenglish and New-oriental Teach-on-line)are selected and the College English Test Composition Corpus(CETCC)is established.With the help of UAM Corpus Tool 3.3h,annotating and retrieving the classification and position of conjunctions in Corpus,the overall usage of conjunction in CET 6composition is analyzed,and grammatical cohesion achieved by “and”,“or” as well as“but” is given,and then coherent effect caused by conjunctions is added.Three questions will be probed in the study:(1)What is the overall usage of conjunctions in writing of CET-6?(2)How can the top three frequently using conjunctions achieve grammatical cohesion in Corpus?(3)What is the coherent effect of using conjunctions as one grammatical cohesive device in CET-6 writings?Major findings of this thesis are as follows:(1)There are various conjunctions used in CET 6 composition,and totally 826 conjunctions occurs in 70 compositions,but the using frequency of each types of conjunctions and every conjunctions is relllydifferent and unbalanced.Among them,additive conjunctions account for 64.77%.Seen from the position,the conjunctions used within the sentences account for 63.38%.In additive conjunction,the top two frequently using conjunctions are “and” as well as“or”;in adversative conjunction,the top two frequently using conjunctions are “but”and “however”;in causal conjunction,the top two frequently using conjunctions are“because” and “so”;in temporal conjunction,the top two frequently using conjunctions are “first” and “then”.(2)Based on the overall use of conjunctions,the top three frequently using conjunctions “and”,“or” as well as “but” are selected and the grammatical cohesion of the three conjunctions in Corpus is given herein.The conjunction “and” occurs 632 times in Corpus,accounting for 38.26%,“or” occurs 132 times in Corpus,accounting for 7.99%.These two additive conjunctions can not only connect the components in the sentences and connect the sentence and sentence,but also be used in set structure;the conjunction “and” and “or” can express semantic cohesion through its information adding function,text constructing function and meaning turning function;“but” occurs108 times in the Corpus,accounting for 6.54%,which can not only connect the components in the sentences and connect the sentence and sentence,but also be used in set structure;the conjunction word “or” can express semantic cohesion through its information adding function and text constructing function.(3)In CET-6 Composition writing,conjunctions can achieve passage cohesion,which can make the text unified,smooth,coherence,logical,readable and understandable.In general,the thesis is beneficial to the study of conjunctions in CET-6composition.The correct use of conjunctions can enable the coherence and reasonableness of the context.This thesis is expected to provide appropriate and sound strategies to CET-6 composition teaching,and valuable reference for students to prepare for CET-6 composition writing.