Comparison of Czech and English Speaker's Use of English Intersentential Connectives in Geographic Articles

The present thesis is a corpus study comparing English and Czech (non-native) speakers' use of intersentential connectives in English geographic articles. The corpus contains English articles written by British English and Czech speakers, and translations from Czech into English. The thesis examines the frequency, formal diversity, semantic categories, position, punctuation, syntactic functions and formality of the connectives in the corpus. The results confirm the original hypothesis that texts written by Czech speakers are less rich in intersentential connectives, which applies both to their frequency and formal diversity. In the other categories, no significant differences were found. The interpretation of the differences is based on negative transfer, later stage in the order of acquiring language components within second language learning and acquisition, and the specificity of Czech scientific writing