ecades, in locating Chinese authors at aninternational standard to author financial essays.In view of this situation, mainly based on the analysis of the sample, this papersystematically examines and analyses causal connectives that are used in financialacademic papers, and to strive and achieve the following research purposes.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
For decades, causal connectives have been an interest for many scholars andlinguists as a way of reasoning in discourse. This chapter will present the previousstudies about causal connectives carried out abroad and in China.
2.1 Previous Studies Abroad
More attention has been conferred to conjunctions, adverbs and inscriptionssince Quirk in 1953 noted the circumstance that there were a large number of regularconsonants in spoken English. For example, “you know, you see”, “well”, “good”,“because”, amongst others. In recent years much research and discussion has beenundertaken, making conjunctions in discourse analysis and grammar research a newresearch topic for linguists. As a common language phenomenon, different scholarshave researched discourse indicators from various points of view. Halliday and Hasanin 1976 defined this phenomenon as connections in their book, Cohesion in English.In this book, they point out that “discourse markers are a kind of relation of meaning,and they can also be used to systematically link the words which are said or used nowwith what has been said or used in the previous discourse or text” (1976: 95).However, researchers for many years do not call this kind of conjunction a discoursemarker, indeed different linguists have different names for them. For example, as wedescribed above, Halliday and Hasan defined them as connections in 1976, while in1985, Quirk et al. defined them as conjunctions, and in 1999, Fraser named themdiscourse connectives, logical connectors, discourse papers, discourse operators, andpragmatic markers (He Ziran & Ran Yongping, 1999).
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2.2 Previous Studies at Home
In recent years, there have been comparative studies of causal connectives on thebasis of corpus linguistics. These studies have made countless contributions to boththe causal connectives research and second language acquisition in teaching andlearning research.Zhang Delu (quoted from Halliday & Hasan, 2001) claims that one of thedirections of the research on cohesion is to continue to carry out micro research on thebasis of promoting the macro research. Although the study of connectives is in itself amicro study, it is also possible to make a more detailed study of a certain class ofconnectives. In 2003, Luo Yi carried out such a study. In the study, she adopts themethod of corpus to study the characteristics of adverbial conjunctions used bymasters majoring in English when writing academic papers. The paper finds that thenumber of adverbial conjunctions that Chinese students used in academic papers aremore than native speakers, however, their stylistic application of the words andunderstanding of the differences of the semantics is not enough.From the perspective of pragmatics, Chen Xinren (2002) investigates the use ofdiscourse connectives by English majors in critical writing, and observes that Chinesestudents could consciously use connectives in the process of writing, but the classes ofthe connective they used are relatively simple, and there are also a small amount ofconnectives that have been misused. With the method of corpus, Zhao Weibin (2003)investigates the overall situation that the use of logical connectors in a variety ofgenres of writing by different students in different English levels and different majors.He finds the number of logical connectors used by Chinese students is larger thannative speakers, but the types and richness of logical connectors i