Page 262 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

248 CHAPTER 10
ance and mobilizing support for strong social control. Because they need to capture the public interest, the mass media often sensationalize crime and deviance. ( T h o m p s o n &
Hickey, 2002, p. 183)
In this excerpt, the sentence-initial position of the because clause con- nects the information in the preceding sentence to that in the main clause (e.g., public opinion—public interest, the mass media—they, and vast power—cap- ture}. Specifically, adverbial clauses at the beginning of sentences play the role of connectives and transitions between ideas and information in keep- ing with the-old-information-first-and-the-new-information last pattern (see chap. 11). Some researchers have found that the majority of all initial clauses consist of if-conditionals that have the function of organizing dis- course and establishing and maintaining topics (Ford &Thompson, 1986). On the other hand, corpus analyses of various genres have demonstrated that conditional clauses are less common in academic writing than in con- versation or fiction (Biber et al., 1999; Leech et al., 2001).
The ability of the sentence-final adverb clause to expand the informa- tion in the main clause can be further noted in the following text, where the information in the clause provides an example for the point made in the main clause:
The annihilation of a minority may be unintentional, as when Puritans brought deadly diseasesthat Native Americans had no immunity to. (Thompson & Hickey, 2002, p. 237)
In addition to the sentence-initial and sentence-final positions, adverb clauses can also occur in the middles of sentences. However, these types of constructions require a break in the flow of information in a sentence, re- sulting in syntactically complex constructions that most (if not all) L2 writ- ers probably would not miss a great deal.
Tenses in Adverb Clauses of Time and Condition
In adverb clauses of time and condition, only the present and past tense can be used:
When medical trials are completed, patients' records will be kept indefinitely. Ifmultinational companiesincreasetheircontroloftheglobalmarket,cross-cultural employment training will become an essentialjob requirement.
In complex sentences with clauses of time and condition, only the main clause can be marked for the future tense.
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