Sentence-initial conjuncts and disjuncts in French EFL and native English writing : A corpus-based study

The aim of the present study is to study the use of conjuncts and disjuncts in sentence-initial position in Belgian French-speaking learner essay writing and to compare it to novice American essay writing. 210 occurrences of disjuncts and conjuncts were analysed in two corpora (ICLE-FR and US-LOCNESS-ARG). The findings indicate that French learners significantly overuse conjuncts and disjuncts in initial position. The findings also show that French learners struggle with the use of these adverbials as we found several instances of misuse. The results highlight three different kind of misuse: semantic, orthographic and stylistic. We also found instances of non-native conjuncts and disjuncts in the French learner sub-corpus. The findings also showed that summative conjuncts and epistemic disjuncts were overused. In contrast, contrastive conjuncts appeared to be slightly underused.