The Placement of English Adverbial Clauses in Narrative Texts of Native Speakers and Chinese College Students

Abstract

在英文裡，副詞子句的重要性決不下於鋹要子句，而其位置之決定更牽涉篇章語法及語用等多重考量。但是國內英語教學鮮少提及英文副詞子句之篇章功能。主要原 因可能是篇章語法的觀念尚未廣泛運用到教學上，所以英五副詞子句的使用分析仍停留在句法結構層次。本研究首先從篇章觀點探討影響英文副詞子句位置的因素。 從而討論學生寫作時，運用英文副詞子句的方式與遭遇的問題。

The placement of English adverbial clauses has scarcely received due attention in the English language teaching in Taiwan. One major reason of such negligence is that the function of adverbial clauses has nto been fully understood by English teachers, and the placement of adverbial clauses has been wrongly treated as a sentence combining issue. The purpose of this study is first, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the discourse function of adverbial clauses, and to see if Chinese students have fully understood the function of adverbial clauses. Then, we wish to apply this knowledge to writing instructions as a part of pedagogical grammar. The results of our analysis shows that the placement of adverbial clauses is highly discourse determined. Discourse factors have been found to contribute to determining the positions of adverbial clauses: foreground/background information structure, the scope of dependence of subordinate adverbial clauses, topic continuity of neighboring clauses, and time sequence of described events.