چکیده:
In an attempt to dispel the persisting fallacy that an individual’s grammar knowledge is indicative of the way they put this knowledge into practice, this study seeks to highlight the inconsistency which resides between one’s competence and performance in the domain of conjunctions. It aims to shed light on the discrepancy which lies between the knowledge and production of conjunctions. The research context was an Iranian high school in Tabriz and the participants included 40 pre-university students whose knowledge of conjunctions was checked once by analyzing the results of a grammar test of conjunctions and once more through the administration of a sentence-combining test of conjunctions. Eventually, the obtained results were juxtaposed for consistency comparison, the ultimate outcome of which suggest that an individual’s demonstrable knowledge of conjunctions in a grammar test cannot be necessarily generalized to the proportional use of them; hence, a set of correct responses given to the questions of a grammar test of conjunctions is not necessarily a valid indicator of their actual use or production. Overall, it is concluded that the participants tend to choose paratactic extending conjunctions over hypotactic ones and hypotactic enhancing conjunctions over paratactic ones despite their adequate knowledge of both.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"Studied under numerous labels such as linkers, coordinators, discourse markers, pragmatic markers, discourse connectors, and many others, conjunctions have received considerable attention in linguistics and that they play a prominent role in discourse is an undisputable fact as they are used as coordination to conjoin "different grammatical units: clauses, clause elements, words" (Leech & Svartvik, 1994:264), (see also Greenbaum & Quirk, 1993:265; Carston, 1994:692).
(β plus α) Paratactic and hypotactic conjunctions can also be viewed from another angle which concentrates on semantic rather than logical relationship in which the secondary clause in the every clause complex has an elaborating, extending or enhancing relation to the primary clause (Halliday & Matthiessen , 2004).
The second phase of the study, which was carried out two weeks after the administration of the first test, embodied 30 sentence-combining exercises which took a whole session’s class time and required the participants to choose from a range of both paratactic and hypotactic conjunctions preceding the exercises to join the clauses.
27 Note: SD: Standard Deviation, SEM: Standard Error Mean Table 5 Paired Samples Test for the number of paratactic and hypotactic extending conjunctions Paired Differences t df Sig.
32 Note: SD: Standard Deviation, SEM: Standard Error Mean Table 7 Paired Samples Test for the number of paratactic and hypotactic enhancing conjunctions Paired Differences t df Sig.
a) otherwise b) thus c) whereas d)although But the sentence-combining test taken two weeks afterwards did not yield the same results as 32 students used the paratactic extending conjunction "but" to join the same clauses above, that is, only 8 out of 40 participants used the hypotactic conjunctions "whereas" and "while" as they did on the multiple-choice test."