Syntactic and Semantic Properties of on the Contrary in British University Student Essay Writing: A Corpus-Based Systemic Functional Analysis

Abstract

In contrast to previous descriptions of on the contrary (OTC) as a corrective or replacive marker requiring explicit negation, this study revealed that more than 50% of the occasions the expression was used in British tertiary level student essays, represented by British academic written English (BAWE) corpus, were not associated with a preceding negation. The frequency information provides a starting point for the qualitative analysis of the two functional types of OTC, i.e., adversative versus replacive. The notions of (topical) theme, rheme, and focus within systemic functional linguistics were proposed as descriptive frameworks to identify the distinct characteristics of each functional type. The replacive type typically employs a preceding negation and a topical theme equal to that of the clause complex preceding the conjunctive, whereas the adversative type is distinguished by the use of a different topical theme and a contrastive rheme. The analysis conducted in this study provided language teachers with a model for helping students comprehend logic semantics expressed by conjunctives by analyzing semantic features of connected clause complexes.