A Corpus Linguistic Study on the Use of However in British Academic Spoken and Written English

Abstract

Corpus studies shed light on academic discourse in terms of genre, lexicon, and grammar. In order to expand grammatical knowledge, this corpus-based study takes as an evidence based approach and focuses on however, a single adverb reported as being one of the most commonly used linking adverbials in academic discourse, and analyses the uses of however in British academic spoken and written English. Analysis of British Academic Written English (BAWE) and British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus provided comprehensive linguistic information on the use of linking adverbial however in terms of its frequency, positional distribution in clauses, collocations and clusters. The findings indicated that contrary to common pedagogic academic writing and English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL) grammar books, however has various functions in British academic English. Furthermore, usages of however differ in written and spoken academic discourse.

Keywords

• however
• conjunction
• academic discourse
• BAWE
• BASE
• EAP