The use of adverbial connectors in advanced Swedish learners' written English

This chapter is concerned with the use of connectors by advanced Swedish English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. It briefly compares the clause position of the connectors in the corpora to see if the learners deviate from the native English norm. Effective communication requires coherence and clarity. One way of achieving this is to signal logical or semantic relations between units of discourse by means of connectors such as but, because, therefore, in addition, for instance. Connectors can be said to function as cohesive 'sign-posts' in discourse, helping the listener or reader to relate successive units to each other and thus making sense of the text. The English and Swedish use of connectors is evidently not different enough for transfer to play an important role, and even in areas where there are cross-linguistic differences, such as the position of conjuncts, the learners seem to have little difficulty in conforming to the target norm.