| Keywords [eng] |
referential cohesion, pronouns, EFL, anaphora, Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA), contrastive analysis, referencinė kohezija, įvardžiai, anglų K2, anafora, gretinamoji tarpukalbės analizė, gretinamoji analizė |
| Abstract [eng] |
This master's thesis investigates patterns of referential cohesion through the anaphoric pronoun it in written English, comparing native speakers with Lithuanian and Norwegian English as a Foreign language (EFL) learners. The research focuses on two types of antecedents—nominal phrases (NPs) denoting concrete to abstract entities, and verbal constructions representing highly abstract discourse elements, examining their distribution, distances, and discourse positioning across three corpora (LOCNESS, LICLE, and NICLE). The findings reveal that while NP antecedents predominate across all datasets, EFL learners demonstrate a statistically significantly higher reliance on verbal antecedents compared to native speakers. This divergence aligns with previous psycholinguistic research suggesting that native English speakers prefer demonstratives for verbal antecedents (Wittenberg et al., 2021; Çokal et al., 2016). The difference appears influenced by first language transfer—Lithuanian “tai” ('it') overlaps with English “it” only in denoting general phenomena, while Norwegian learners may underuse “dette” ('this') due to its primarily formal register status in Norwegian. Antecedent-anaphor distances varied considerably, with native speakers maintaining cohesion over longer stretches for NP antecedents (up to 125 tokens) through thematic continuity and lexical reiteration. In positioning, NP antecedents appeared in the same sentence as their anaphors more frequently (76% in LOCNESS, 68% in LICLE) than verbal antecedents (56% in LOCNESS, 36% in LICLE). Norwegian learners demonstrated statistically significant differences from native speakers by placing NP antecedents in sentences preceding “it” more frequently. This master's thesis additionally identifies areas for future investigation: hypothetical antecedents, implicit antecedents, and number agreement violations using the singular pronoun “it”. |
