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ABSTRACT: In this study we focus on cohesion in discourse, and more specifically on connector usage. Acknowledging the importance of combining a top‐down and a bottom‐up approach in the study of discourse, we adopt a bottom‐up approach which is favoured by our methodology. In the first section we evaluate previous studies of learner connector usage and the literature on contrastive French‐English connector usage. We hypothesize that we will discover a general overuse of connectors by learners and use the ICLE corpus of learner English to test the hypothesis. Our study reveals no overall overuse of connectors by learners and thus contradicts the initial hypothesis. A more qualitative look shows strong evidence of overuse and underuse of individual connectors, as well as semantic, stylistic and syntactic misuse. We conclude that learners should not be presented with lists of ‘interchangeable’ connectors but instead taught the semantic, stylistic and syntactic behaviour of individual connectors, using authentic texts.
Granger et al. (Fri,) studied this question.