A Corpus- Based Study of Additive and Adversative in Clause Complex: The case of British and Pakistani Research Discourse

Abstract

The present study aims at investigating the frequency distributions of conjunctive relations such
as additive and adversative in native and non-native Pakistani research discourse by applying the
framework of conjunctive relations (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). In order to achieve the objectives
of the present study, two corpora native and non-native are developed each comprising of one
million words. The analysis of native and non-native research discourse is carried out by utilizing
the mixed method approach (QUAN→qual) (see Creswell 2007). The study reveals that additives
are more frequently (9.36%) used in the Pakistani corpus as compared to that of native corpus.
On the other hand, adversative conjunctions are more frequently (6.32%) used in the native corpus
as compared to that of non-native Pakistani corpus. The findings expose that non-native corpus
showed 1.51% lower variety of conjunctive relations as compared to that of native corpus. The
study implies that non-native researcher’s access to the native research discourse will enable them
to widen their knowledge about the correct and multiple use of additive and adversative
conjunctive relations in their research discourse.