USE, MISUSE AND OVERUSE OF ‘ON THE OTHER HAND’: A CORPUS STUDY COMPARING ENGLISH OF NATIVE SPEAKERS AND LEARNERS

Abstract

This study investigates the use of ‘on the other hand’ as a logical connector in the academic writing of Turkish doctoral students. The learner corpus used is composed of academicallyadvanced non-native students’ doctoral dissertations (applied and theoretical linguistics fields) and the study also compiled the control corpora, the first one is a corpus of academic essays written by professional native speakers and the second control corpus is The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Students’ own writings are made comparisons between established writers’ papers in their field and COCA. Despite different genres, established writers’ edited papers are preferred instead of native students’ doctoral dissertations, it gives corpus analysis comparing with genres. The results revealed that the overall frequency of ‘on the other hand’ used by the Turkish doctoral students were greater than that used by the professional writers. However, the Turkish doctoral students did use ‘on the other hand’ in proper manner as natives did, that is, there was not a misused situation from the point of academically-advanced non-native users. The findings also showed that, according to the COCA results, ‘on the other hand’ is more frequent in academic genre, less frequent in spoken, magazine, fiction and newspaper genres, respectively.