A contrastive study of the variation of sentence connectors in academic English

•Analyses variation in the use of sentence connectors by NES and NNES.•Compares the use of connectors across sections of the research paper.•Writers with different cultural backgrounds express their identity differently.•NES: writer-oriented in academic English.•Variation may be a projection of the discourse organisation of NES and NNES.

This paper focuses on the variation of sentence connectors in academic English and, more specifically, on the issue of whether language use can change depending on the linguistic background of the writer. This study takes a functionalist point of view to analyse academic language in use; furthermore, identity and interpersonal style are also taken into account. The main objective of this paper is to analyse whether native English speakers and non-native English speakers vary the frequency of connectors and their use across different sections of research papers depending on the rhetorical choices of the writers to construct identity. In order to accomplish this, a corpus of forty academic papers was created and the uses of sentence connectors were analysed. The occurrences of the categories and of individual connectors were compared in order to determine whether Spanish writers of English and native English writers employed the same categories of sentence connectors to join ideas and the categories used in the sections of the research paper. The results were contrasted and the conclusions confirmed the initial hypothesis of this study: variation may exist in academic English, as the interpersonal style of writers could be different when their linguistic background is different.

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