Pragmatic Aspects of Temporal Adverbial Clauses in English Novels
Keywords:
Pragmatic aspects, temporal adverbial clauses, English novelsAbstract
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
Diessel, H. (2008). Iconicity of sequence: A corpus-based analysis of the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses in English. Cognitive Linguistics, 19(3), 465-490.
Duffley, P., & Arseneau, M. (2012). Tense and control interpretations in gerund-participle and to-infinitive complement constructions with verbs of risk. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue Canadienne de Linguistique, 57(1), 31-50.
Fisher, R., & Duffley, P. J. (2019). A cognitive-semantic study of verbal complementation with adjectives expressing the emotion of fear in
Canadian English. Cognitive Semantics, 5(1), 121-146.
Gries, S. T., & Wulff, S. (2021). Examining individual variation in learner production data: A few programmatic pointers for corpus-based analyses using the example of adverbial clause ordering. Applied Psycholinguistics, 42(2), 279-299.
Haegeman, L. (2010). The internal syntax of adverbial clauses. Lingua, 120(3), 628-648.
Ismail, F. K. M., & Zubairi, A. M. B. (2022). Item objective congruence analysis for multidimensional items: Content validation of a reading test in Sri Lankan University. English Language Teaching, 15(1), 106-117.
Kim, K. (2015). A pragmatic-functional account for information structures in Academic Journal of Linguistics Research, (37), 25-53.
Lazar, G. (1990). Using novels in the language-learning classroom. ELT journal, 44(3), 204-214.
Melchers, G., & Shaw, P. (2013). World Englishes. UK: Routledge. Radford, A. (2009). Introduction to English sentence structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Seo, Y. & Kim, C. (2020). The use of short fiction in a writing class: Pedagogical suggestions for secondary level teachers in EFL setting. English Teaching, 75(1), 119-139.
Swan, M. (2016). Practical grammar usage: Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wong, S. W., Miao, H., Cheng, R. W. Y., & Yip, M. C. W. (2017). Graphic novel comprehension among learners with differential cognitive styles and reading abilities. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 33(5), 412-427.
Wongkittiporn, A. (2021). Semantic classes and syntactic orders of adverbial clauses in a British cookbook. RSU international Research Conference, 36-47.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
Categories
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Journal of MCU Humanities Review
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
