A Contrastive Analysis of Conjunctions Used by Non-English Majors and English Majors in Spoken Corpora

On the basis of Halliday and Hasan's theory of cohesion and SFG, this paper presents a study on conjunctions used by NEMs and EMs on Chinese learners' spoken English corpora. Following Quirk et al.'s classification, similarities and differences of conjunctions used by NEMs and EMs have been contrastively examined. After quantitative and qualitative analysis it has been found out: (1) Both groups frequently use a larger number of listing and resultive relations, whereas a small number of summative, inferential and transitional relations. (2)Their use of semantic categories are significantly different, NEMs underuse some listing, inferential, contrastive, transitional conjunctions while they overuse summative, appositive and resultive ones. (3)Chinese learners bear the written features in their spoken discourse. Finally, some factors which may contribute to such features have been analyzed such as lack of register awareness, different thinking modes, and restrictions to test topics.