A Quantitative Corpus-based Analysis of Linking Adverbials in Students’ Academic Writing

This study is an attempt to analyze the use of linking adverbials by Polish students in their academic writing. To the best of my knowledge, the use of linking adverbials by students with Polish L1 background has not been yet examined. Scheffler (2008) has analyzed learner language of Polish students of English in opposition to native language, however, his work has a broader scope focusing on word clusters. The underlying assumption is that specific linking adverbials are overused by Polish students. This assumption was investigated in the past by Scheffler (2008) who showed that Polish students’ essays are much more explicit than newspaper editorial texts in marking logical relations or meaning connections between clauses and sentences (2008: 174). This paper will, however, examine more heterogenic corpora of texts.