Textual Relations with Conjunctive Adverbials in English Writing by Chinese Speakers: A corpus-based Approach

Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing Vol. 26, No. 1, June 2021, pp. 43-78 43  The Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing Textual Relations with Conjunctive Adverbials in English Writing by Chinese Speakers: A corpus-based Approach Tung-Yu Kao and Li-Mei Chen Abstract The study aims to investigate the use of conjunctive adverbials (CA, hereafter) performing various textual relations in the English writing by Chinese speakers across genres and over time. To begin with, a corpus of one million word was compiled and the corpus interface was constructed. Later, 45 pieces of writing by 5 college students during 4 semesters were selected for data annotation and analysis, with each student contributing 9 pieces for 9 text genres. The results show that there exists a distribution norm of CA-performed textual relations based on CA occurrence frequency and that the distribution is independent of genre and time effects. Compared with literature, the found distribution is also considered free from the first language influence. This suggests that the found distribution is a mental representation of mature human cognition, underlying English writing on global and coherent levels. Therefore, the found distribution is of great potential for developing automatic tools of discourse diagnosis. Keywords: Conjunctive Adverbial, Textual Relation, Text Genre, English Writing, Corpus Compilation, Automatic Discourse Diagnosis. 1. Introduction Implemented in August 2019, Curriculum Guidelines of 12-Year Basic Education (MOE, 2014) has ushered in a new era of the English education in Taiwan. In the past, the English education in school was under severe criticism for overemphasizing sentential grammaticality and understating discoursal and pragmatic aspects. The concern has received attention and been addressed. In the spirits of the curriculum reform, the Guidelines for the English education (MOE, 2018) specifies that students should be taught to identify text genres through  Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University E-mail: dodofishletter@hotmail.com; leemay@mail.ncku.edu.tw The author for correspondence is Li-Mei Chen. 44 Tung-Yu Kao and Li-Mei Chen text features, pay attention to cohesion and coherence across sentences, and employ reading strategies, such as skimming and inferring, to comprehend the text as a whole. In other words, the focus of the English education in Taiwan evolves to direct students to the importance of textual relations on the discourse level. In fact, in higher education, the emphasis of textual relations in classes for English writing had been well addressed. It is found that most writing textbooks (Connelly, 2013; Langan, 2010; Lannon, 2007; Morenberg & Sommer, 2008; Reid, 2000; Smalley et al., 2012; Wyrick, 2008) introduce various genres by indicating that some conjunctive adverbials (CAs, hereafter) are more prominent in certain genres than other CAs based on the textual relations they perform. For instance, CAs, such as firstly, next, and in addition, are thought to appear more in the process genre to show progressive relations across sentences or paraphrases. All things considered, learning to recognize and employ CAs that signal textual relations in genres can be said to become a highlighted component throughout the English education in …

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