Die gebruik van konjunksiemerkers by nagraadse studente en gepubliseerde navorsing oor Afrikaanse taal– en letterkunde

Abstract

The line of argumentation in a well-structured argumentative text or academic essay should exhibit logical continuity. Conjunction markers are one of the resources that writers can use to achieve this objective. By means of conjunction markers, the idea world is represented in a coherent fashion. The present article presents a corpus linguistic investigation into the possible quantitative and qualitative differences in the use of conjunction markers in the academic essays and journal articles of postgraduate students and published researchers respectively, in the area of Afrikaans language and literary studies. The findings are that the quantitative differences between the corpora are small, while the qualitative differences imply that students use some conjunction markers in a more speech-like or informal way. Students also use the high frequency conjunction markers even more, while researchers make more frequent use of the low frequency conjunction markers. In spite of this, the finding is that the differences between the student and researcher corpora are not statistically significant as far as the majority of conjunction markers are concerned.