An Exploratory Analysis of Linking Adverbials in Research Articles Across Different Disciplines (original) (raw)
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A corpus-based study of linking adverbials through contrastive analysis of L1/L2 PhD dissertations
A corpus-based study of linking adverbials through contrastive analysis of L1/L2 PhD dissertations, 2017
The quality of a writing highly depends on cohesion and coherence as they affect the tone of writing to a great extent. Linking adverbials (LAs) are among the types of cohesive devices which help connect ideas in a more smooth way. However, use of linking adverbials is often problematic for non-native speakers of English as they often overuse, underuse or misuse them in their writings (Granger & Tyson, 1996; Lei, 2012). This study aimed to compare LAs used by Turkish native speakers (TNSs) in their English written PhD dissertations with LAs used in PhD dissertations of native English students in terms of frequency of using linking adverbials, and detect if LAs are overused or underused by TNSs. AntConc software was utilized for the quantitative analysis. Frequency counts and log-likelihood calculations were utilized to determine if the frequency differences between two corpora reached statistical significance. The results indicated a significant overuse of linking adverbials by Turkish doctoral students in their PhD dissertations. The study concluded with discussions of overused LAs as well as pedagogical implications and suggestions to improve teaching practices and materials such as implementing extensive awareness-rising activities on LAs and including authentic examples in the ELT materials.
Linking adverbials in academic writing on applied linguistics by Chinese doctoral students
The present paper reports an investigation into the use of linking adverbials in the academic writing of Chinese doctoral students. The learner corpus used in the present study is composed of 20 applied linguistics doctoral dissertations. We also compiled a control corpus of 120 published articles in six international journals of applied linguistics to use as the norm of the analysis. The findings indicated that the overall frequency of linking adverbials used by the Chinese doctoral students were greater than that used by the professional writers. A total of 33 linking adverbials were found to be overused by the doctoral students. Of them, besides and actually were identified as misused. Meanwhile, 25 adverbials were identified as underused by the doctoral students. Of them, the adversative adverbials were most problematic to the doctoral students. The results also showed that the doctoral students relied more heavily on a limited set of linking adverbials than the professional writers in their academic writing. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research are presented at the end of the paper.
The Use of Adverbial Connectors in Academic Writings of Native and Non-native Speakers 1
It is a well-known fact that among the most problematic issues in academic writing for EFL learners, there lies the use of adverbial connectors, which present complexity in different levels of meaning. In fact, the probable conflicting situations in the use of adverbial connectors both in native and non-native students' academic productions has been investigated widely all over the world so far. With this purpose in mind, investigating adverbials in learner English through native and non-native corpora, the present study aimed to compare the most distinguishing adverbial usages as well as the overuse and underuse patterns in native and non-native corpora. The two academic written corpora employed for this purpose which included "British Academic Written English" (BAWE) and "Karadeniz Technical University Corpus of Academic Learner English" (KTUCALE), which were designed according to strict design criteria. In the analysis of the corpus data, Sketch Engine online interface was used, and the obtained findings were presented in numerical order in the form of tables, figures and graphics. Initial findings indicated strong overuse and underuse patterns in the use of adverbials between the two corpora. There were various but limited number of adverbials employed in non-native corpus data. Findings also indicated that native corpora significantly differed from the non-native corpus in the use of certain adverbials.
Adverbs are seen as evaluative elements that reveal the subjective intervention of a writer. Their presence in scientific discourse shows that despite the objective claims made in this genre, signs of the writer’s intervention do exist. Therefore, the present paper seeks to study the influence of the context of scientific writing on the choice of adverbs. Being based on the functional classification of adverbs (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004), the focus is shed on their interpersonal dimension. In fact, seeing that any language exchange is based on the presence of writer/speaker and reader/listener, the aim is to study the influence of changing the context (sub-genres of scientific writing, research paradigms) on the nature of interpersonal exchange traced in the use of certain adverbs. For this purpose, a corpus of published research articles and abstracts of RAs is collected from two different research paradigms (scientific and interpretative). Both qualitative and quantitative methods are used in the analysis to study the extent to which the context influences writing and to prove that an interpersonal exchange can be found in scientific publications. In fact, the analysis of the corpus shows that different strategies can be used by the writer in order to persuade the reader of his/her expertise.
Adverbial Connector Use in Published Academic Research Articles of Turkish Nnes Writers
The current study focuses on the usage of adverbial connectors (ACs) in two corpora compiled from the published research articles of academicians: Turkish Academic Corpus (TAC) consisting of the published journal articles of Turkish NNES scholars published in National and International Journals in Turkey and American Academic Corpus (AAC) consisting of the articles of NES scholars published in major international journals. The corpora consist approximately of 1.200.000 words for the TAC and 2.500.000 for the AAC. According to conjunctive roles additive, contrastive, summative, appositive, resultive and inferential ACs were chosen for the analyses. On the quantitative aspect of the study, the overuse and underuse of ACs in both corpora was examined in detail and a qualitative analysis was carried out to confirm the overuse and underuse of ACs to reveal the overall usage pattern of the two groups of writers. The results revealed significant differences in the use of ACs between NNES a...
Native and Non-Native Writers' Use of Stance Adverbs in English Research Article Abstracts
Stance in scientific writing has been a major focus of attention. However, studies on stance in the research article abstracts have been relatively scarce in Turkey compared to those in other academic prose. Abstracts contain various sections in which information on the purpose, method, results, and conclusions of the study is presented to promote the study and to attract readers' attention. In this respect, the abstract foregrounds the main findings and serves a promotional purpose (Hyland & Tse, 2005). By comparing abstracts written by Turkish and native writers of English, this paper tries to explore how academic writers from different scientific communities construct author's stance in research article abstracts. In particular, the present study attempts to analyze lexico-grammatical features in research article abstracts focusing specifically on stance adverbs. Stance adverbs (clearly, probably, apparently) present the attitude or assessment of the speaker/writer with respect to the proposition (Biber, 2006). The corpus consists of 240 abstracts from the disciplines of sociology, psychology, linguistics, physics, chemistry and biology. The results revealed significant differences in the total number of stance adverbs. Native writers of English employed more stance adverbs in their abstracts than Turkish writers. Differences were also found of stance adverbs in soft and hard sciences. Academic writers in the soft sciences used more stance adverbs in their abstracts. Considering variations in scientific discourse across cultures and disciplines, the results of the study may have some pedagogical implications for academic writing courses.
Linking adverbials in L2 English academic writing: L1-related differences
System, 2018
Appropriate and effective use of linking adverbials (e.g., furthermore, in addition, on the other hand) plays an important role in discourse cohesion, yet how these items are used by second language (L2) writers is still insufficiently understood. In the present study, a learner corpus of 150 argumentative essays was analyzed to determine how linking adverbials were used by L2 English academic writers from three different first language (L1) backgrounds (Arabic, Chinese, French). Using quantitative and qualitative measures, unique production tendencies in the writing of each L1 group were identified. Findings include relative overuse of additive linking adverbials (e.g., in addition, also) by L1 Arabic writers, contrastive linking adverbials (e.g., however) by L1 Chinese writers, and appositional linking adverbials (e.g., in fact, indeed) by L1 French writers of L2 English. Pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed.
Romanian Journal of English Studies, 2017
One of the most distinctive linguistic characteristics of academic writing is the high frequency of nominalized structures. The present study explores how nominalization was used as an approach to making knowledge claims in applied linguistics research articles. Data comprised the introduction and method sections of 16 empirical papers featuring the IMRD (Introduction, Method, Result, Discussion) format, drawn from the most recent issues of 10 journals, with a total of 40,122 running words, from which 3,150 instances of nominalization were drawn. Analyzing these nominalized structures in the cotext of their local spans revealed 15 patterns, with the preference for some of the patterns varying across the introduction and method sections of these articles. Results showed a higher concentration of nominalization in the introductions. The study also identified the more prevalent nominal expressions in each section. The fact that each of these sections serves different purposes appears t...
Linguistics and Literature Studies, 2019
The study reports a comparative investigation into the way Arabic first language (L1) and English native language scholars construct cohesive English texts in linguistics research articles through the use of linking adverbials (LAs). It was framed by Biber et al.'s (1999) classification of LAs. The corpus comprised 80 published research articles in a linguistics journal written in English by native and Arab scholars (304,144 words). Both qualitative and quantitative analyses have been conducted in order to investigate the semantic uses of LAs and their frequencies and percentages. There were overall similarities between the two datasets and slight differences that can be related to cross-cultural and L1 influence. Some Arab scholars had the tendency to overuse additive adverbials by comparison to other LAs. This tendency might be linked to their L1, such as Arabic which heavily uses additive adverbials. The findings revealed the non-native English speaking scholars' (NNES) slight preference for using formal (e.g. 'in order to') over less formal adverbials (e.g. 'so'). The distribution pattern of the categories was similar in both datasets. The study suggests investigating other genres of RAs written within different disciplines.