The adverbialization of but in Taiwan EFL writing

In EFL writing, BUT shows a regular occurrence at sentence-initial position, a non-standard use that is prescriptively prohibited in written texts. In this present study, we use a corpus approach to first identify the frequency pattern of the positional variation of BUT in learners’ writing. The pattern is then analyzed in terms of its variance between different proficiency levels to see if there is any developmental difference. We also compare the learners’ positional pattern with native speakers’ usage with reference to the British National Corpus. The result shows that the positional pattern of BUT in EFL writing resembles that in native speakers’ oral (rather than written) production. As we further examine the use of sentence-initial BUT, we detect grammatical and functional features that point to the adverbialization of BUT. We further argue that such adverbialization is discourse-register awareness continues to be a major problem for Taiwan EFL learners. Copyright © 2013 Presses Universitaires de Louvain.