学术英语中因果类话语标记语的使用: 基于语料库的研究

This study investigates the use of causative and consequential Discourse Markers (DMs) in native English argumentative academic writing from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) and argumentative writing on similar topics from the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners 2.0 (SWECCL 2.0). The findings are as follows: (1) Small proportions of causative and consequential DMs constitute an overwhelming percentage (about 70%) of the overall uses in both native English and learner English corpora. (2) The total ratios of these DMs in the two corpora are almost the same, which is about 2:1 in both, which might be attributed to genre and/or topic influence. (3) In the native speaker corpus, both causative (as high as 86.03%) and consequential DMs are more frequently placed in the middle section of the sentence rather than at the beginning. (4) Native speakers’ favorite consequential DM is “therefore”, and 54.81% instances of “therefore” occur in the middle section of sentences and of these instances 41.54% occurs on the left side of main verbs; another 45.19% are placed at the left of subjects in flexible positions. Meanwhile, compared with native speakers, the learner corpus has the following features: (1) With a smaller portion of causative and consequential DMs constituting a much higher percentage of all instances, their distributions are more uneven. (2) Higher percentages of causative and consequential DMs are placed at the beginning of sentences, but nevertheless they apply more causative DMs in the middle, rather than the beginning, of sentences. (3) Learners overuse “so” as consequential DMs despite its spoken register. (4) They tend to use more “as a result” and “so that” as consequential DMs and more “because”, “since” and “after all” as causative DMs.