The use of conjunctions as a textual cohesion tool in the Czech of non-native speakers

In the paper, we explore cohesive devices in Czech texts written by students – non-native speakers. Specifically, we focus on conjunctions (significantly contributing to text coherence) from the point of view of text genres; we analyse four basic genres, namely narration, information, argumentation and description, and we follow the relative occurrence of text conjunctions across them. Methodologically, we use data obtained from the CzeSL-SGT corpus (AKCES 5; Šebesta et al., 2014) containing texts written by non-native speakers of Czech. The texts are annotated with text genres, students’ age, text evaluation (A–C levels according to CEFR, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) and other additional information. For our analysis, we selected texts of narration, information, argumentation and description written by students at the age of 16+. We examined the occurrence of conjunctions at the individual CEFR levels (A, B and C). The absolute numbers of occurrences were converted to relative frequencies (the i.p.m. value – Instances per Million Positions). The aim of the analysis is to find out whether the particular genres differ in frequency and diversity of text conjunctions and whether some difference also occurs across the CEFR levels – A: basic user, B: independent user, C: proficient user. Based on the corpus data, we conclude that conjunction devices contributing to text coherence occur most frequently in the genre of argumentation, followed by narration, less in description and information. The individual genres are explored in detail also with respect to the CEFR levels of A–C. A and B levels exhibit the same tendencies, i.e. conjunction devices occurred most frequently in genres with the following order: argumentation (A: 90,680.64 i.p.m., B: 90,088.53 i.p.m.), narration (A: 72,287.64 i.p.m., B: 77,511.01 i.p.m.), description (A: 66,940.08 i.p.m., B: 66,856.51 i.p.m.), and information (A: 51,424.80, B: 61,542.47). In the C category, the relative occurrence of conjunctions in narration (83,751.65 i.p.m.) and argumentation (83,376.42 i.p.m.) appeared to be similar, whereas they were less frequent in information (66,648.96 i.p.m.) and description (57,153.67 i.p.m.). The results, however, may beinfluenced by the lower number of data in the C category. The results demonstrated that the occurrence of conjunction devices is related to the nature of the text genres: argumentation and narration appear to be more higher-structured genres in terms of discourse relations. They contain more complex coherence relations than description or information, and therefore, they also contain more conjunction devices that make discourse relations better comprehensible and prevent misunderstanding of the text as a whole.

Keywords: discourse connectives, text genres, foreign language acquisition, non-native speakers, Czech