Academic Papers in English and the Distribution of Sentence Adverbials by Native vs. Non-native Writers
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Theories and Practices: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Anglophone Studies, September 7-8, 2011, Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Czech Republic |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | academic papers; native academic writers; novice academic writers; sentence adverbials; sequential adverbials |
| Attached files | |
| Description | The use of sentence adverbials, i.e. syntactically and/or prosodically detached conjunctive and disjunctive adverbials, is one of the most powerful tools for achieving cohesion in academic texts. Although the genre of academic papers reveals a tendency to some degree of formal uniformity within individual disciplines as the discourses are becoming increasingly international, there persist significant differences in frequency as well as distribution of lexical and grammatical devices between native and non-native users of English. The paper examines preferences of these two groups in the use of sentence adverbials in academic papers dealing with humanities. The research draws on several corpora of expert and novice native and non-native academic texts. Among the findings of the analysis are observable tendencies to overusing or underusing certain adverbials and their distributional patterns displayed by individual groups of authors. |