Pragmatic Aspects of Temporal Adverbial Clauses in English Novels

ผู้แต่ง

  • Abhinan Wongkittiporn English Language Department, College of Liberal Arts, Rangsit University, Thailand

คำสำคัญ:

Pragmatic aspects, temporal adverbial clauses, English novels

บทคัดย่อ

            The objective of this study was to investigate pragmatic aspects of temporal adverbial clauses in novels as written in English. Whilst previous studies, which focused on adverbial clauses, selected the texts of EFL writing, English cookbooks and academic texts, the current study investigates the pragmatic aspects of adverbial clauses in English novels. They are reading materials that are suitable for everyone to read regardless different ages and genders.

            In regard to methodology, the data collection of English novels in this study are derived from five novels with different authors: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Dahl, 2007), Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, 2013), the Midnight Plan of the Repo Man (Cameron, 2014), Naked Lunch (Burroughs, 2016), Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys, 2016) and the War of the Worlds (Well, 2018). From a total of approximately 300,000 words, there are 39 tokens of temporal adverbial clauses that were collected to be studied with their main clauses. The analysis of temporal adverbial clauses follows Swan (2016) who provided the temporal adverbial connector keywords, such as after, when and whilst. After going through the process of the data analysis, three linguists were instructed to check the accuracy of the data analysis for the sake of reliability.

            The results show that the occurrences of temporal adverbial connectors in this study are until, before, when and while at different percentages. The use of these temporal adverbial clauses was explained by two reasons: pragmatic aspects of iconicity of sequence and end-weight principle. It is expected that the results of this study will be useful for learners of English as Foreign Language (EFL).

References

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2023-06-29