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Explication of conjunction errors in a corpus of written discourse by Sudanese English majors
Hamid Abd Allah Arabi1, Nauman Al Amin Ali2.
Cohesion is deemed to be an indispensible aspect of all written discourse and, hence, this study is
intended to explore the employment of the cohesion subset of conjunctions by Sudanese finalyear
English majors at a large governmental university. The corpus comprises fifty
argumentative and narrative essays, and Halliday and Hasan‟s (1976) taxonomy of conjunctions
was utilized as a model for analysis. It was revealed that the corpus was replete with
inappropriate conjunction use and it was difficult to dissociate these errors from the students‟
overall poor writing quality. Yet, on the whole, additives constituted half of the entire errors,
followed by causals and adversatives. Concerning additives, and addition proved to be the most
problematic, as students tended to transfer both the pervasive use of and and its multiple
semantic functions in Arabic into the altogether different English discourse. Among causal
conjunctions, because and so misuses together formed the bulk of errors, since the students were
apt to confuse result and cause relations in English. Finally, but and although misuse accounted
for two thirds of all adversatives errors, largely due to the students superimposing conventions of
Arabic discourse, where double- marked subordination is permissible., on English where such a
practice is regarded as erroneous. The analysis is accompanied by numerous examples to
illustrate the (erroneous) employment of conjunctions in the corpus.
Affiliation:
- Al Neelain University, Sudan
- University of Khartoum, Sudan
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