Sentence adverbials in academic texts: Preferences of native vs. non-native writers
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | One of the most effective tools for achieving cohesion in writing for academic purposes is the use of sentence adverbials, i.e. syntactically and/or prosodically detached conjunctive and disjunctive adverbials, functioning as explicit discourse markers. The increasing globalisation of science and dominance of English as its lingua franca have resulted in a certain linguistic and formal uniformity of texts published throughout various disciplines; however, regular differences can be identified within individual disciplines between native and non-native users of English, as well as between expert and novice academic writers. The chapter looks into the choices and distribution of sentence adverbials in academic papers and essays in a narrow segment of science, namely linguistics and (language) teaching methodology, particularly focusing on the distribution of sequential adverbials. The analysis has been carried out on several corpora of native and non-native, expert and novice academic texts. The findings indicate that some distributional preferences for certain adverbials are attributable to certain categories of writers. The chapter tries to explain such systemic choices and suggests implications for the variety of English for Academic Purposes. |