earticle

영어

This study examines the use of conjunctive adverbials (CAs) in the research articles (RAs) written by American (ENL), Hong Kong/Singaporean (ESL), and Korean (EFL) scholars. Specifically, this study aims to identify and analyze the overall frequency of CAs and usage patterns of the four semantic categories of CAs occurring in the three groups as well as any patterns of overuse, underuse, and misuse by each group. The results indicate that the overall frequency of CAs used by the Korean EFL scholars was significantly greater than that of the ENL and ESL scholars. They overused adversative and causal categories of CAs most often, while the frequency of use of CAs in all semantic categories was nearly identical between the ENL and ESL scholars. With a closer examination of the actual use of individual CAs, some misuse of CAs was found in both the ESL and EFL groups, but the amount of misuse was greater in the EFL writing. The problematic use of CAs was found to be due to a misunderstanding of semantic and grammatical functions which may have led to a failure in developing logical relation in writing.