Hi Tammy,

You've asked for some information about the different ways these connectives are used in English:

1	- therefore,  and therefore, Therefore (at the beginning of a sentence)
2	- then, and then,  Then
3	- so, and so,  So
4	- however,........       .......... , however,.........                However.........

The nature of the task suggested by your request makes a comprehensive answer impossible, but I'll try and address some of the more interesting features in each case.

I had a look first in the Cobuild Dictionary, and then, because you seem to be interested in differences relating to the punctuation surrounding these connectives, in our 5 million word corpus of modern English to get a rough idea of the relative frequency of each pattern.

1. therefore

According to Cobuild, 'you use therefore to indicate that what you are about to say is the result of something that has just been said, or to introduce a conclusion that you are about to make.' There doesn't seem to be any difference in meaning depending on the punctuation used. Here is a rough guide to the frequency of punctuation:

Most of the time, in both written and spoken English therefore is used with no punctuation at all.

therefore occurs after a semi-colon, comma or full-stop more frequently in academic or formal writing.

and therefore occurs quite frequently (approximately 30% of all citations) both with and without punctuation.

2. then

Because there are so many different ways in which then is used, I can't cover them all here, and it might be better for you to spend some time going through the entries in Cobuild.

For teaching purposes though, probably the most useful connective use of then is to signal a summary, i.e. when you are introducing a conclusion and intend to refer to what you have said previously, e.g.

In conclusion, then, we can see that the main factors leading to the revolutions were ...

When then is used in this way, there is always a comma after it.

3. so

Again, because so can be used in so many different ways, it is really beyond my scope to try and itemise them all here! Far better to spend some time poring over Cobuild, as you will have a better idea of exactly which aspect you wish to focus on.

From our corpus though, it appears that the vast majority of instances where so is used as a connective are in spoken or informal English.

As you might expect, there were very few cases where so was followed by a comma.

When So, (followed by a comma) occurs at the beginning of a sentence, it is normally used to signal that the speaker is about to refocus the discussion, or summarize what has been decided.

4. however

I started off by looking at our collection of students' compositions, and of nearly 700 instances of however, there were only 1 or 2 cases where however is used to convey a non-contrastive meaning, (e.g. no matter how much, etc.)which suggests that the contrastive meaning is the only use which is taught - I wonder if that is the case - it would be interesting to get feedback from teachers on this point.

Another point I noted from my observation of the student corpus is that with 1 or 2 exceptions, Hong Kong students only ever use However,at the beginning of a sentence.

In contrast, the native speaker corpus reflected a much more flexible approach - one point of particular interest to me is that in most cases when However is used to begin a sentence, that sentence just happens to be the first sentence of a new paragraph.

Sorry that this answer is rather patchy, but hope there is something of interest for you

Regards,

Quentin

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