A Corpus- Based Study of Temporal and Causal Conjunctions in Clause Complex: A Case of British and Pakistani Research Discourse

Abstract

The current corpus-based study investigates the frequency distributions of temporal and causal conjunctive relations in British and Pakistani research discourse by utilizing Halliday and Hassan (1976) framework of conjunctive relations. The study achieves its objectives by developing two corpora, British and Pakistani, each consisting of one million words. A mixed-methods approach (QUANàqual) was employed to analyze the frequency distributions of temporal and causal conjunctions in both British and Pakistani corpora (Cresswell, 2007). The findings of the study show that temporal and causal conjunctions are less frequently used in the Pakistani corpus than in the British corpus. The study implies that Pakistani researchers’ access to the native research discourse will enable them to widen their knowledge about the correct and variant use of temporal and causal conjunctive relations in their research discourse.

Keywords: Conjunctive relations, Causal, Pakistani and British corpus, SFL, Temporal,