Coherence and Cohesion in English Discourse

No. of words
in all texts 
57,819
Non-native 
speakers 
77,533
Native 
speakers 
Types of
conjuncts
No.
Norm. 
frequency
No.
Norm. 
frequency
after all
1
0.02
alternatively
2
0.03
anyway
1
0.01
at the same time
1
0.02
2
0.03
by contrast
4
0.05
conversely
9
0.16
1
0.01
however
91
1.57
111
1.43
in any case
1
0.02
in contrast
2
0.03
7
0.09
instead
6
0.08
nevertheless
8
0.14
18
0.23
nonetheless
1
0.02
2
0.03
on the contrary
2
0.03
1
0.01
on the other hand
9
0.16
2
0.03
still
9
0.16
19
0.25
though
2
0.03
3
0.04
yet
6
0.10
14
0.18
admittedly
1
0.01
of course
2
0.03
8
0.10
once again
2
0.03
on the one hand
2
0.03
rather
2
0.03
8
0.10
by comparison
1
0.02
albeit
2
0.03
4
0.05
or else
2
0.03
1
0.01
TOTAL
151
2.61
219
2.82
Table 2-5: Contrastive/concessive conjuncts in both corpora

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51
The semantic category of contrast/concession as a whole tends to be frequently 
expressed not only in my data, with a frequency of occurrence of 2.61 in the 
NNSC and 2.82 in the NSC, but in academic written discourse in general since, 
as stated in Kortmann (1991: 161), concession can be regarded as “the most 
complex of all semantic relations that may hold between parts of a discourse” 
and therefore it is not surprising that it is frequently expressed explicitly by DMs 
including the conjuncts discussed in this chapter (for details concerning novice 
academic writing, cf. Povolná 2010, 2012, Wagner 2011). These markers are used 
in order to guide the reader(s) through the text and enable an interpretation which 
is coherent with the author’s communicative goals. However, it must be noted that 
most writers, especially those who come from non-native academic traditions, do 
not resort to the whole repertoire of contrastive/concessive conjuncts that are at 
their disposal but usually give preference to a few favourites.
In addition to 
however
, other conjuncts typically used to express contrast/
concession are, for example, 
on the other hand
in the NNSC, where it reaches a 
frequency rate of 0.16, and 
yet
in the NSC, whose frequency amounts to 0.18; both 
of these conjuncts are included in the following examples, where they introduce 
other authors’ voices in the text. The former conjunct, which is illustrated in 
Example (13), is more common in the NNSC, where probably it tends to be 
applied under the influence of the writers’ mother tongue, namely the Czech 
phrase 
na druhé straně
. The latter conjunct, illustrated in Example (14), not only 
introduces into the text a voice other than the author’s, but it also illustrates how 
the other voices can respond to the voices of yet other authors. Example (14) also 
includes one token of 
though
, which is common neither in the NNCS nor in the 
NSC, having a frequency rate of 0.03 and 0.04 respectively. This conjunct is used 
together with the resultive/inferential 
then
, which occurs in the adjacent clause as