A Corpus-Based Study on the Use of the Logical Connector ‘Thus’ in the Academic Writing of Turkish EFL Learners

This research was conducted to investigate how frequently Turkish advanced learners of English use the logical connector ‘thus’ in their academic prose and to investigate whether it was overused, underused or misused semantically in comparison to English native speakers. The data were collected from three corpora; Corpus of Contemporary American English and 20 scientific articles of native speakers as control corpora, and 20 scientific articles of Turkish advanced EFL learners. The raw frequencies, frequencies per million words, frequencies per text and log-likelihood ratio were measured so as to compare varieties across the three corpora. The findings revealed that Turkish learners of English showed underuse in the use of the connector ‘thus’ in their academic prose compared to native speakers. Additionally, they did not demonstrate misuse in the use of the connector ‘thus’. Nevertheless, non-native learners of English tended to use this connector in a resultative role (cause-effect relation) more frequently whereas native speakers used it in appositional and summative roles more as well as its resultative role. Furthermore, the most frequent occurrences of ‘thus’ have been in academic genre.