Linking adverbials: An across-register corpus study and its implications

Liking adverbials (LAs) play a very important role in discourse cohesion. This study examines the frequency and usage patterns of English LAs (110 in total) across five registers (Spoken English, Academic Writing, Fiction, News Writing, and Other writings) in the BNC. While the data analyses offer support for some previous research results, they also yield new findings regarding, among other things, variations in the adverbials’ frequency distribution and usage patterns across the five registers. For example, while fiction’s overall use of LAs is much lower than that of speaking and academic writing, its use of the sequential type of LAs is actually higher than the latter registers’. Also although news has the lowest overall LA frequency among the five registers, it boasts the highest use of LAs that express simultaneity (e.g. meanwhile). Besides discussing new findings, the paper also addresses their implications for language description, learning, and teaching.