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Discourse connectives in texts written by non-native speakers of English
Kubánková, Eliška ; Rysová, Magdaléna (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
The thesis discusses the topic of discourse connectives as means of textual cohesion in formal texts written by non-native speakers of English. The material used for the analysis is a corpus of 161 application emails written by students whose language proficiency corresponds to the level B2 in the Common European Framework of Reference. The aim of the thesis was to determine the frequency and kinds of connectives used by B2 speakers, and to help specify the level B2 in terms of writing. The analyzed aspects were frequency, types of connectives (one- word/multi-word, primary/secondary), their morphological and syntactic classes, scope (inter- /intra-sentential), position in the sentence; further the types of discourse arguments and semantic types of relations expressed. It was found that most connectives were one-word, primary expressions realized by conjunctions and adverbials. The most frequently occurring connective was and, followed by because and the adverbs so and also. The most frequent semantic type of relation expressed was expansion, followed by contingency (cause), which can be attributed to the text type. Some secondary structures were also found, including different modifications of the clauses The reason is and That is why. The preferred position of connectives was initial, and their...
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