A Comparative Corpus-based Study Of Linking Adverbials In Chinese And English Native Scholars’ Academic Writing

As a means of textual cohesion,linking adverbials play an important role in the realization of textual coherence.However,it is not clear to what extent the use of linking adverbials by Chinese students or scholars deviates from that by English native speakers in the construction of academic discourses.Based on this,this research takes applied linguistics as an example,and selects 30 research papers from the Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics and Applied Linguistics respectively as the study language data.Chinese Expert Corpus and Native Expert Corpus are established,and the use of linking adverbials in Chinese and English native academic discourses is found to possess the following characteristics by comprehensive use of corpus-based analysis and contrastive interlanguage analysis:1)In terms of the overall usage frequency of linking adverbials,there is no statistically significant difference in the overall usage frequency of linking adverbials between Chinese and English native scholars.2)In terms of the over-representation and under-representation of linking adverbials,Chinese scholars tend to over-represent sequential linking adverbials to express ideas in a temporal and spatial order,and under-represent adversative linking adverbials in order to avoid making statements in an emphatic way and presenting contrary viewpoints.In addition,because certain linking adverbials are alternative with one another,Chinese scholars’ over-representation of certain specific linking adverbials will lead to the under-representation of their alternatives.3)In terms of the position preference,generally speaking,Chinese scholars tend to place linking adverbials in the sentence-initial position while English native scholars tend to place them in the sentence-medial position.From the perspective of subcategory of linking adverbials,Chinese scholars tend to put additive,sequential and adversative linking adverbials in the sentence-initial position while English native scholars however have a tendency to place them in the sentence-medial position.and both Chinese and English native scholars have a tendency to place causal and resultative linking adverbials in the sentence-initial position.Although Chinese scholars tend to be similar to English native scholars in the use of linking adverbials,there are significant differences between them in the use of subcategories of linking adverbials and their position distribution.The present study,through quantitative and qualitative analysis,objectively revealed the similarities and differences in the use of linking adverbials in Chinese and English native scholars’ academic discourses.Its results are helpful for Chinese scholars and students’ improvement of their understanding of the deviations in the use of linking adverbials and will provide them with reference for the accurate and standardized use of linking adverbials in academic writing.