Afrikaanse verbandsmerkers: uitbreiding en herkategorisering van voorbeeldwoorde

Transition markers are words or phrases that connect parts of a text with regard to the relationship between parts of the text. These markers are classified as metadiscourse, but the problem lies in the fact that only English sample words are listed in most cases. The main taxonomy of the transition marker categories distinguishes between additive, adversative, causal, and temporal relationships, and the Afrikaans classification thereof is provided, but these lists have to be expanded, and some sample words need to be reclassified. A corpus linguistic investigation was done by means of WordSmith Tools (edition 6.0) to establish the functional relevance of transition markers used by students in their academic writing, in order to refine the existing list. Concordance rules from three corpora (two corpora consisting of 109 first-year student texts with word counts of 54 586 and 56 151 respectively, and a third corpus of 39 honours student texts with a word count of 168 531) were used to determine which relationships were indicated between the relevant transition markers. The purpose of the reclassification and expansion of Afrikaans transition markers is for application at tertiary level with regard to the teaching of Afrikaans students.