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Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Research Background
Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, two famous Canadian modern female writers,were both born in 1930s. They published their works at the end of 1960s.Alice Munro is a famous Canadian female novelist, known for her short stories inthe world. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 and was called the “masterof contemporary short stories” and “Contemporary Chekhov”. Her short storiesmainly focus on ordinary life of ordinary people especially women with hiddentragedy. Her writing theme is also about the love and family daily life of people in thesmall towns of this city, which involves birth, illness, senility and death. Munro hasbeen writing short stories for more than 60 years, though she was first published in1968. Her collections include Dance of the Happy Shades, Dear life, Friend of MyYouth, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Lives of girls andwomen, Open Secrets, Too Much Happiness, The View from Castle Rock, The Love ofa Good Woman, The Progress of Love, Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You,Runaway, The Beggar Maid. Over the course of her career, she has won the ManBooker International Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, andCanada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction—three times.Margaret Atwood, known as “the Queen of Canadian Literature”, is also one ofthe most distinguished female literary figures in contemporary Canadian literature.She wins great popularity and reputation for her outstanding contribution to Canadianliterature and is extremely concerned about the degradation of nature as well as theoppression of women in the patriarchal society. Atwood Margaret’s poetry is the mostremarkable in the world literature, including The Circle Game, The Animals in thatCountry, Power Politics, You are Happy, Selected Poems, Two-headed Poems, BodilyHarm, and her famous novels include The Edible Woman, Dancing Girls, Surfacing,The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and so on.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
Comparison is one of the basic ways to grasp the usage of adverbs and the mostbasic and effective way of grammar study. By comparison of English and Chineseadverbial conjunctions from perspectives of syntactic features, semantic relations andtextual cohesive function according to cohesion theory, functional grammar theoryand discourse analysis theory, we can have a better understanding of the similaritiesand differences of English and Chinese adverbial conjunctions.Adverbs play an important role of modification and restriction being used beforeverbs and adjectives. They have an irreplaceable function in the language expression,which can not only make the words more tactful, humorous and incisive, but can alsomake the discourse coherent and semantic expression more accurate and appropriate.Linguists at home and abroad studied from the angle of comparative linguistics andlinguistic typology and some other theories, and made fruitful results in the ontologyresearch of comparative study of Chinese and English adverbs. Now they almost havethe consistent understanding of the role of Chinese and English adverbs in semanticexpression, while it is still in the initial stage in the comparative study of Chinese andEnglish adverbial conjunctives. The related studies are far from enough.Yuan Surong put forward the phrase “adverbial conjunctions” in A ComparativeStudy of Adverb