A Comparative Study On Linking Adverbial Positions Between English Academic Discourse Of Chinese And English Native Speakers

In recent years,as studies on academic discourse are increasingly deepened,more attention has been paid to linking adverbials,which play a cohesive role in discourse.However,there are few comparative analyses on linking adverbial positions between English academic discourse by English native speakers and Chinese native speakers,especially those between different text types of academic discourse by English native speakers and Chinese native speakers.Based on the two self-built corpora of academic discourse by English native speakers and Chinese native speakers(respectively about 270,000 words),this study conducts a comparative analysis of linking adverbial densities(word-based and sentence-based)at different positions across different text types,and positional distributions of linking adverbials in different semantic categories and those with high frequencies in the two corpora.Through the comparative analysis,this study reveals the preference of Chinese native speakers in using linking adverbials in English academic discourse when compared with English native speakers.In addition,this study,based on the corpus of English native speakers,further explores the correlation between linking adverbial positions and their influencing factors such as semantic categories and realization types.The results show that:(1)In terms of the overall density distributions of linking adverbials,the density of linking adverbials at the initial position used by Chinese native speakers is obviously higher than those used by English native speakers.The densities of linking adverbials at medial positions used by Chinese native speakers are obviously lower than those by English native speakers.There is no significant difference between them in terms of linking adverbial density at the end position;(2)Concerning different text types of academic discourse,Chinese native speakers tend to place linking adverbials at the initial position in undergraduate argumentative essays and master theses in linguistics.The densities of linking adverbials at every position in research articles in computer science by Chinese native speakers are higher than the densities of those by English native speakers.The density of linking adverbials at the initial position in research articles in physics by Chinese native speakers is significantly lower than the density of those by English native speakers.The word-based and sentence-based approaches of calculating linking adverbial densities cause different results in the analysis of density distributions of linking adverbials;(3)As for different semantic categories of linking adverbials,Chinese native speakers use more additive,causal and sequential linking adverbials at the initial position,but the positional distributions of causal and sequential linking adverbials at non-initial positions lack variety.There is no significant difference between Chinese and English native speakers in the positional distribution of adversative linking adverbials.As for the use of high-frequency linking adverbials,Chinese native speakers overuse some linking adverbials(so,therefore,then-r,etc.)at the initial position,and use more also between the subject and the verb than English native speakers do.Besides,Chinese native speakers would clutter up texts by unnecessarily using too many linking adverbials.The above preference of Chinese native speakers for linking adverbial positions may be related to Chinese expression habits and English teaching characteristics;(4)With regard to the influencing factors of linking adverbial positions,additive and causal types of linking adverbials relative to sequential type significantly influence linking adverbial positions.It is the same with single word or phrases functioning as linking adverbials relative to clauses or to infinitives as linking adverbials.According to the effect coefficients of different semantic categories and realization types,a multinomial logistic regression model with relatively high accuracy is established for predicting the position of linking adverbials.This study to some degree can help Chinese native speakers correctly understand and choose linking adverbial positions in their English academic discourse.The research results also show some significance for the method of calculating linking adverbial densities as well as the application of multinomial logistic regression analysis in linguistics.