Linking Adverbials in the Corpus of Student-Composed Texts
Linking Adverbials in the Corpus of Student-Composed Texts

Summary/Abstract: Register-based use of linguistic features, in this case linking adverbials, has not been sufficiently investigated in non-native students’ composed texts of various communicative purposes. The aim of this study is to inform about non-native student writing by examining the frequency of linking adverbials according to their semantic categories in the corpus of non-native student-composed texts (Faculty of Humanities, University of Latvia) that have been arranged in three registers according to the communicative purpose. The extracted linking adverbials have been grouped according to their semantic functions (as proposed by Biber et al. 1999). Then the use of the most frequent linking adverbials in students’ essays was compared with their word-level frequency in other learners’ and professionals’ texts investigated by linguists in their studies. The obtained results have revealed that the overall distribution of linking adverbials across students’ texts shows their variation according to the communicative purpose of these texts. However, the students tend to overuse a limited range of linking adverbials in their formal texts irrespective of linking adverbial variety in each semantic category. These results imply the topicality of the students’ involvement in the concordance-based investigation of the linguistic features, in particular, adverbials in the English authentic texts compiled in corpora that should be followed by the analysis of their own composed texts. This study also confirms that further research of linking adverbial use in student- composed texts of different registers is required.

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