awej 5 no.4 full issue 2014

AWEJ Volume.5 Number.3, 2014Explication of Conjunction Errors in A Corpus of WrittenArabi & AliDiscussion and AnalysisCohesive relations, as used in the present study, are based on the categorization set forthby Halliday and Hasan (1976). An initial survey of the distribution of the four cohesion typesrevealed conjunction to be the most widely employed category. Indeed, on average, each of thefifty students commits almost seven errors of this type. This could be attributed to the prevalenceof grammar and structural linguistics in teaching English in Sudan, as pointed out by Noureen(2002).Statistics below first provide figures on the distribution of each type, followed by adeeper consideration of each category and the possible explanations. Due to space constraintsand their relatively insignificant distribution, temporal cohesive devices will not be dealt withseparately. It is hoped that explanations of the other categories will illuminate the functions ofthis type. It is to be noted that asterisks will be used to mark the ungrammatical sentences in thecorpus.Table 2. Types of Conjunction ErrorsType of Conjunction No. of Errors Percentage Mean1. additive 172 50.29% 3.442. causal 88 25.73% 1.763. adversative 48 14.03% 0.964. temporal 34 9.94% 0.68Total 342 100% 6.84Additive Conjunction ErrorsTable [2] below shows this type of errors to be the most prominent among conjunctionerrors detected in the examined written discourse. The errors of this category, alone, account forhalf of the entire errors relating to conjunctions. Additive errors are further sub-classified intofour smaller-groups (addition, misuse, replacement and omission) in accordance with whatprocess a certain group of errors entails. The following table shows the frequency of occurrenceof the groups in the corpus.Table 3. Types of Additive Conjunction ErrorsType of conjunction No. of Errors Percentage Meana- addition 118 68.9% 2.36b- misuse 33 18.9% 0.66c- replacement 19 11.1% 0.38d- omission 2 1.1% 0.04Total 172 100% 3.44The conjunction errors of the addition subcategory entail using a particular conjunction insentence positions where it is not applied. They include the following conjunctions: and, or, also,in addition, add to this, even and as well. The statistics reveal addition errors including and, orand also as the most frequent conjunctions. Moreover, among the three, and is the highest inArab World English JournalISSN: 2229-9327www.awej.org118