A study of connectors in English texts written by Italian and German students

Corpus linguistics is the study of languages with an empirical approach consisting in the analysis of written or oral texts, collected with specific characteristics depending on the purpose of the research. An historical outline of corpus linguistic studies starting from the creation of parental diaries in 1800, followed by the oppositions between rationalists with Noam Chomsky and empiricists, and ending with the contribute of computer software in the late 90s gives the possibility to approach the subject and focus on the study centre of the thesis: a corpus-based study that shows how different groups of non- native speakers of English vary in their use of sentence connectors. Amongst the different types of corpora, such as multilingual or monolingual, spoken or written, general or specialized, learner corpora are here investigated. Learner corpora are collection of texts written by non-native speakers, learners of a foreign language. Second Language acquisition studies offer different approaches to analyse learner corpora depending on the purpose of the research. The three main approaches are Contrastive analysis, Error analysis, and Interlanguage. Focusing on language for academic purposes, the study shows the importance of learner corpora analysis not only for research purpose, but also for the students, who have the possibility to improve their linguistic skills in the language that they are learning through the use of corpora, analysing their own texts or also those of other students. Two main examples of corpus-based studies on the use of connectors by academic students of English are then provided. One was carried out by Altenberg and Tapper (1998) on Swedish learners of English and the other one by Carrió-Pastor (2013) on Spanish students and native speakers. The contrastive study, main object of the thesis, that I conducted on German and Italian students of English on The International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) focuses on quantitative data of the use of specific resultive, listing and contrastive connectors. The results of the comparison confirmed the original hypothesis: overall, German students use fewer conjuncts than Italian students.