Yan Zhang Adversative and Concessive Conjunctions in EFL Writing Corpus-based Description and Rhetorical Structure Analysis Adversative and Concessive Conjunctions in EFL Writing Yan Zhang Adversative and Concessive Conjunctions in EFL Writing Corpus-based Description and Rhetorical Structure Analysis 123 Yan Zhang EastChinaUniversity of ScienceandTechnology Shanghai, China ISBN978-981-15-7836-6 ISBN978-981-15-7837-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7837-3 JointlypublishedwithShanghaiJiaoTongUniversityPress TheprinteditionisnotforsaleintheMainlandofChina.CustomersfromtheMainlandofChinaplease ordertheprintbookfromShanghaiJiaoTongUniversityPress. ©ShanghaiJiaoTongUniversityPress2021 Thisworkissubjecttocopyright.AllrightsarereservedbythePublishers,whetherthewholeorpart of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission orinformationstorageandretrieval,electronicadaptation,computersoftware,orbysimilarordissimilar methodologynowknownorhereafterdeveloped. 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The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Preface This work is a comparative study of adversative and concessive conjunctions in English texts written by Chinese EFL learners and the native-speaker writers, who are comparable in age and educational stage. Adversative and concessive con- junctionsareexpressionsthatindicatesemanticrelationsofcontrastandconcession between text spans of varying extent. According to Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004) systemic account of clause complexing and CONJUNCTION, adversative andconcessiveconjunctionsfallintotwobroadsyntacticcategories,i.e.,structural conjunctionsthatlinkorbindclauseswithinthedomainofasingleclausecomplex (e.g., but, although, etc.) and cohesive conjunctions that typically mark relations beyond the clause complex (e.g., however, nevertheless, etc.). In view of the meaning relations, these conjunctions represent two different semantic categories, i.e.,adversativetypeofextensionandconcessivetypeofenhancement.Veryoften, anadversativeorconcessiveconjunctioncanbeusedwithagreatdealofsemantic overlap between these two types of expansion. That is, the same instance of a conjunctioninatextmaybeinterpretablebothadversativelyandconcessively.The indeterminacybetweencontrastandconcessionhasbeendiscussedintheliterature on grammaticalization. For instance, Ramat and Mauri (2008) argue that “the diachronic paths attested for adversative and concessive connectives partially overlapasfarasoriginallytemporalvaluesareconcerned,buttendtodivergeinthe remaining cases” (p. 5). Given the complex nature of adversative and concessive conjunctions at the syntacticandsemanticlevels,theseconjunctionshavebeenasourceofdifficultyfor EFL learners in writing. This book aims to investigate the syntactic and semantic categories ofadversative andconcessiveconjunctionsandtoexplorethe discourse functions of these conjunctions in writing of Chinese EFL learners and native speakers. Drawing on Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2004) notion of grammar as a meaning-making resource, this book is oriented toward uncovering the meaning distinctions between a group of adversative and concessive conjunctions instanti- ated in English texts written by Chinese EFL learners in comparison with those written by their native-speaker counterparts. v vi Preface Motivated by the concern with probability profiles and systemic potentials of adversative and concessive conjunctions, the study combines the strengths of two researchmethods,i.e.,thecorpus-basedapproachandtext-basedanalysisalongthe lines suggested by Matthiessen (2006). The corpus-based approach makes it pos- sible to analyze a group of conjunctions in large data sets in quantitative terms of certain low-level lexico-grammatical features such as syntactic positions and co-occurrence patterns. However, analysis involving text-level features is difficult tohandlewiththisapproach;thesefeatureshavetobeexploredinfull-lengthtexts manually.AsdiscussedinMatthiessen(2006),inlightoftheexpecteddifficultyof analyzingalargevolumeofdatamanually,theusualpracticeistohaveatrade-off between low-level analysis of large-volume data and high-level analysis of small-volume data. The present study draws on a learner corpus and a native-speaker corpus. The learner data is taken from the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) (Gui and Yang 2003) and the native-speaker data is based on essays from British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE-E), a corpus of proficient student writing for degree programs at UK tertiary institutions (Nesi and Thompson 2007). The corpus-based analysis starts with an overview of a total number of 17 adversative andconcessiveconjunctionsacrossthetwocorpora.Comparisonsaremadeinthree majorareas: (i)overallfrequencyanddistributionofthetypesofinter-dependency between clauses, namely structural and cohesive; (ii) distribution of semantic cat- egories, i.e., adversative, replacive, and concessive; and (iii) positional distribu- tions, such as clause-initial and clause-medial positions concerning cohesive conjunctions and initial and final dependent clauses concerning the subordinating (hypotactic) type of structural conjunctions. Following the overview of a group of 17conjunctions,thenextstepofthecorpus-basedanalysisisdevotedtothedetailed study offour specific conjunctions, namely but, while, and however. The in-depth study focuses on the syntactic and co-occurrence patterns of these conjunctions to shed light on the specific type of semantic relations they encode. The text-level analysis is based on a full-length text taken from the Chinese Learner English Corpus. The text-level analysis is of particular importance in accounting for the discourse properties of adversative and concessive conjunctions used in Chinese EFL learners’ writing. Specifically, it is concerned with searching fordiscursiveevidenceastowhyandhowadversativeandconcessiveconjunctions are used with other linguistic choices instantiated in English texts written by Chinese EFL learners. Finally,basedonthefindingsfromthecorpus-basedanalysisandthetext-based analysis, pedagogical implications are drawn. The pedagogical implications take into account both features of text and variables of context, intending to systemize EFL writers’ linguistic choices of adversative and concessive conjunctions in relation to context. The perspective to EFL writing adopted in this book is in line with the multi-perspective second language writing theory suggested by Silva and Matsuda(2001).SilvaandMatsuda(2001),intheintroductionofLandmarkEssays onSecond LanguageWriting,emphasizetheneedfor atheoryofsecond language Preface vii writing that considers various elements of second language writing––including the writer, the text, and the context, as well as the interaction of these elements. Itishopedthatthepresentstudyofadversativeandconcessiveconjunctionswill not only contribute to our understanding of these conjunctions in terms of the meaningscreated,butalsotoourunderstandingofthesystemicpotential ofclause complexing and CONJUNCTION as complementary grammatical resources for realizing semantic relations, and ultimately to our knowledge of grammar as a meaning-making resource. To the best of my knowledge, this study is among the first to adopt a corpus-based Systemic Functional Linguistics perspective in investigating the semantic relations encoded by adversative and concessive con- junctions in EFL writing. Shanghai, China Yan Zhang June 2020 Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 Research Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 The Complexity of Adversative and Concessive Conjunctions. . . . 2 1.3 Aims of the Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.4 Research Questions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.5 Organization of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2 Conjunctions and Logico-Semantic Relations: A Review of Theoretical and Empirical Research. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.1 Traditional and Systemic Functional Grammar Descriptions of Conjunction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.1.1 Traditional Descriptions of Conjunctions and Linking Adverbials. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2.1.2 The SFL-Based Approach to Clause Complexing and CONJUNCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.1.3 Comparing Different Approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 2.2 Adversative, Replacive, and Concessive Relations: Some Basic Distinctions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 2.2.1 Antithesis, Neutral Contrast, and Concession in RST. . . . . 32 2.2.2 Semantic Opposition, Denial-of-Expectation and Correction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 2.2.3 Comparing Different Classifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 2.3 Empirical Studies on the Use of Conjunctions and Linking Adverbials in EFL Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 3 Combining Corpus-Based Description and Text-Based Analysis. . . . 43 3.1 Data Description. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 3.1.1 Learner Corpus Used: CLEC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 ix x Contents 3.1.2 Native-Speaker Corpus Used: BAWE-E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 3.1.3 Compatibility Between CLEC and BAWE-E. . . . . . . . . . . 48 3.2 An Account of the Combined Method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 4 An Overview of Adversative and Concessive Conjunctions in CLEC and BAWE-E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 4.1 Overall Frequency and Distributions of Interdependency Types. . . 57 4.2 Distribution of Semantic Categories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 4.3 A Complementary View: Circumstantial Augmentation Versus Clause Complexing and Conjunction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 4.4 Syntactic Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 4.4.1 Syntactic Distribution of Structural Conjunctions. . . . . . . . 71 4.4.2 Syntactic Distribution of Cohesive Conjunctions . . . . . . . . 76 4.5 Analyzing Multivalent Conjunctions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 5 Co-occurrence Patterns of but in CLEC and BAWE-E. . . . . . . . . . . 85 5.1 An Overview of the Co-occurrence Patterns of but in CLEC and BAWE-E. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 5.2 Analysis of but in fact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 5.2.1 Sentence-Initial but Co-occurring with in fact in CLEC . . . 88 5.2.2 Sentence-Initial but Co-occurring with in fact in BAWE-E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 5.2.3 Co-occurrence of but in fact Within Clause Complex in BAWE-E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 5.2.4 Co-occurrence of but in fact Within Clause Complex in CLEC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 5.3 Analysis of but I think . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 5.3.1 Functions of but I think in CLEC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 5.3.2 Functions of but I think in BAWE-E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 5.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 6 The Positioning of While-Clauses and the Implications for Understanding the Types of Logico-Semantic Relations of While . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 6.1 Sequences of While-Clause and the Main Clause in a Hypotactic Nexus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 6.1.1 Conjunctive Adjuncts + While-Clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 6.1.2 That-While-Clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 6.1.3 Section Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 6.2 Comparing Initial and Final While-Clauses for Different Meanings in CLEC and BAWE-E. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 6.2.1 Quantitative Findings of Initial and Final While-Clauses offor Different Meanings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 6.2.2 Initial While-Clauses for the Adversative Sense. . . . . . . . . 130 6.2.3 Initial While-Clauses for Concession. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 Contents xi 6.2.4 Final While-Clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 6.2.5 Section Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 6.3 Further Evidence of the Distinction Between Adversative and Concessive Sense of While . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 6.3.1 SubjectinWhile-ClausesContainingMay:AQuantitative Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 6.3.2 Relation of Subject Selection to Modality in While-Clauses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 7 Analysis of however: Clause Positions and the Implications for Logico-Semantic Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 7.1 Positional Distribution of however in CLEC and BAWE-E. . . . . . 149 7.2 Analysis of Clause-Initial however. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 7.2.1 Clause-Initial however for Adversative Extension . . . . . . . 150 7.2.2 Clause-Initial however Used for Concessive Enhancement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 7.2.3 Summary of the Functions of Clause-Initial however . . . . . 155 7.3 Analysis of Clause-Medial and Paratactic however . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 7.3.1 Functions of Post-subject however . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 7.3.2 Functions of however After an Initial Circumstantial Adjunct. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 7.3.3 The Paratactic Use of however . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 7.4 Analysis of Clause-Final however . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 8 Text-Based Analysis of Adversative and Concessive Conjunctions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 8.1 An Overview of the Text-Based Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170 8.2 Thematic Interpretation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 8.3 Instantiation Patterns of Clause Complexing and CONJUNCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 8.4 Rhetorical Structure Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 8.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 9 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 9.1 Summary of Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 9.2 Suggestions for Future Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Appendix A: The Error Tagging Scheme of Chinese Learner English Corpus (Gui and Yang, 2003) .. .... .... .... ..... .... 197 Appendix B: Logico-Semantic Annotation of While-Clauses in BAWE-E and CLEC ... .... .... .... .... ..... .... 201 References.... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... 231