Conjunctive Adverbials and Modal Auxiliaries in English Academic Journal Articles: Taiwanese Graduate Students vs. Native Writers

• Main Authors: Li, Tzu-ching, 李姿靜
• Other Authors: Tsao, Feng-fu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/yrzhy9

博士 === 國立清華大學 === 語言學研究所 === 103 === This study investigated the usage of conjunctive adverbials (CAs) and modal auxiliaries in the introduction section of linguistics/TESOL-related and IEEE journal articles written by English native and Taiwanese graduate students. The four corpora compiled by the author were used for analysis. Each of the Taiwanese learner corpora consists of 100 academic articles and per native English-speaking student corpus contains 50 journal papers. The frequency of CAs and modal auxiliaries in the data was calculated by using AntConc. Their functions and uses were interpreted according to metadiscourse from a pragmatic perspective. On a large-scale, corpus-based study, the quantitative results have presented that both Taiwanese EFL learners and English native writers were inclined to use a fixed and limited set of CAs; however, non-native students relied heavily on some of the most commonly used CAs in particular. The analysis in terms of the discrepancies per 10,000 words indicated that some semantic relations are more preferred by student writers whereas other semantic relations are less preferred. In addition, the qualitative analysis demonstrated that some of the Taiwanese students used certain CAs such as besides, therefore inappropriately and had problems with the use of some CAs which were less familiar to them. The modal auxiliary can was calculated to have occurred most frequently, especially in Taiwanese electrical/electronics engineering students’ writing. We also analyzed how the two sets of devices function as metadiscourse markers like hedges, emphatics, attitude markers, and engagement markers in academic writing. Taiwanese writers used modal auxiliaries as hedges less often than native writers. Disciplinary variations in the use of CAs and modal auxiliaries were also revealed under the cross examination of the four sets of writings. The results of our research may assist learners to employ these two linguistic devices efficiently in academic writing.