In this section, four empirical researches on European language speakers’ use of conjunctive adverbials will be reviewed: Lornez (1999), Granger and Tyson (1996), Altenberg and Tapper (1998), and Tankó (2004).
Lorenz (1999) made a quasi-development comparison of causal connective uses in argumentative essays by German learners of English and English natives. The contrastive corpora comprised one sample of 142, 131-word Juvenile German learners’ writing, one sample of 71, 881-word German undergraduates’ writing, one sample of 106, 730-word Juvenile British writers’ writing, and one sample of 94, 962-word British undergraduates’ writing. Causal links studied consisted of causal conjunctions, causal adverbs (that is, causal conjunctive adverbials), causal
prepositions, lexical causal patterns and nominal realization of causal relations.
The result showed that the use of causal links by native speakers indicated an increasing text-type differentiation, viz. a graduation toward a formal style of writing by applying links that tend to occur in formal register, for example, the causal adverbs therefore and hence. Learners’ use of causal links, on the other hand, did not show a
consistent gain as they grew in age and had more exposure to the target language.
German learners, moving from juvenile to undergraduate level, seemed to have an increase in the use of some types of causal links, which is parallel to the phenomenon in native speakers; however, with a closer look at learners’ individual link usage, a number of non-native patterns revealed. German learners exhibited a preference to place either some grammaticalized causal links (e.g. so and because) or lexicalized causal items (e.g. one reason is…) in initial position, especially sentence-initial position, or in theme position. Moreover, the frequency of these causal links revealed an increase with age when the two German learner groups were compared.
Learners’ overuse of some causal links also demonstrated their difficulties in the
control of registers and lexical semantic prosodies. They mixed the spoken register with formal written register and overextend words’ semantic meanings.
Granger and Tyson (1996) drew on subcomponents of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) to investigate the use of connectors (i.e. conjunctive adverbials) by advanced French learners of English and to test the hypothesis that French learners would overuse connectors. The choice of connectors for the study was based on Quirk et al.’s (1985) list of connectors, excluding temporal connectors and adding certain attitudinal disjuncts and some emphasizers.
The result showed that the overuse hypothesis was invalid. Learners both overused and underused some connectors. The overused connectors were corroborative connectors (indeed, of course, in fact), appositive connectors (for instance, namely) and one additive connector (moreover). On the other hand,
connectors underused were the resultive type (therefore, thus, then). Learners’ overuse and misuse problems, except for the appositives, were L1 induced. Learners had preference for the initial position of connectors and this phenomenon was not language specific. Finally, Granger and Tyson (1996) claimed that learners mixed formal and informal registers in writing and it was the result of style insensitivity, which was due to the falsity of language instruction and EFL materials.
Altenberg and Tapper (1998) examined the use of adverbial connectors (that is, conjunctive adverbials) in advanced Swedish learners’ written English (extracted from the Swedish component of the International Corpus of Learner English) and compared it with the use in comparable types of native Swedish and native English writing.
They also compared the Swedish learner’s usage with that of advanced French learners of English in Granger and Tyson (1996).
The result showed that Swedish learners had an overall tendency to use fewer adverbial connectors in writing than both the native English students and Swedish
natives in their native language writing. Swedish learners also significantly underused resultive and contrastive adverbial connectors. They preferred to place connectives in sentence/clause initial position and such a preference was even stronger than the English students. Altenberg and Tapper (1998) stated that these deviations from the English native norm were not signs of L1 transfer and instead they may be due to the task in which learners had to express themselves in a foreign language.
Altenberg and Tapper (1998) also compared their study with Granger and Tyson’s (1996) study on French learners. The comparative results indicated that the Swedish learners underused adverbial connectors to a much larger extent than the French learners. Altenberg and Tapper cautiously stated that it might be connected with differences in the educational background of the two learner groups. Moreover, the result revealed a surprising similarity on the overuse and underuse of connectives.
They ruled out L1-induced transfer as an explanation for the over-/underuse of most of these adverbial connectors. Both groups of students underused resultive and contrastive connectors.
Finally, Tankó (2004) studied the use of adverbial connectors (that is,
conjunctive adverbials) in argumentative essays by Hungarian advanced learners of English (English major undergraduates). The result indicated that Hungarian students used slightly fewer adverbial connectors than the native writers. The most common type of semantic relationships expressed by the Hungarians is the listing function, followed by the resultive and contrastive functions. Hungarian students have a
tendency to arrange a highly structured contrastive set of ideas cumulatively and then emphasize a conclusion. Such a tendency is in contrast to that of English natives who tend to emphasize the cause-effect relations with the overt use of significantly more resultive connecting items. The results also showed that learners had an adequate awareness of the positions of adverbial connectors and they were aware of the register
characteristics of those adverbial connectors as their use of adverbial connectors in majority were formal.
From the review of the European studies on the use of conjunctive adverbials, two aspects of insightful information can be derived from their methodological
designs and the information should be taken into consideration in our research design.
The first is on the selection of data for investigation. Both the learner and native data in these studies were not only large in quantity but also comparable in terms of genre (mostly argumentative) and participant’s backgrounds (for example, native and non-native speakers were undergraduates). The other issue is the incorporation of a semantic classification scheme in the analysis of the types of conjunctive adverbials.
That is, three out of the four analyses adopted the same semantic scheme in Quirk et al.’s (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of English. A semantic classification scheme like that enables us to look into how writers use conjunctive adverbials to mark semantic relations in discourse in addition to an overall frequency analysis.
Meanwhile, Lornez’s (1999) study on the use of causal links by German learners highlights that writers may revert to different syntactic structures to express the same semantic relations (that is, the causal relation in Lornez’s (1999) research). This reminds us to interpret the overuse or underuse of any semantic type of conjunctive adverbials with caution. For instance, the underuse of one semantic type of
conjunctive adverbials may be due to the writers’ preference for another syntactic means, such as lexical nouns, to express the same semantic relation, and is not because writers seldom indicate that type of semantic relation in discourse.
A summary of the European empirical studies on conjunctive adverbials is provided in Table 2.2.
Table 2.2 Summary of research on European language speakers’ use of conjunctive adverbials Researchers Subjects Methodology Number or type of
conjunctive adverbials
Results on learners usage Sources of errors
Lornez
informal-style & causal links
1. register insensitivity
Table 2.2 continued
Researchers Subjects Methodology Number or type of conjunctive
adverbials
Results on learners usage Sources of errors
Altenberg &
2. preference for the listings, resultives and summatives 3. initial position
preference for the listings and summatives to do superstructural marking