Adverb placement in EFL academic writing: Going beyond syntactic transfer

Tove Larsson, Marcus Callies, Hilde Hasselgård, Natalia Judith Laso, Sanne van Vuuren, Isabel Verdaguer, Magali Paquot

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Scopus citations

Abstract

The present study looks at adverb placement in expert writing and in first-language and second-language novice spoken and written production. The extent to which first-language (L1) transfer is still present in advanced learners' written production is also investigated. The study uses data from one expert corpus (LOCRA), two native-speaker student corpora (BAWE and LOCNEC) and two learner corpora (VESPA and LINDSEI). The results highlight the importance of taking mode into consideration, as clear distributional differences were found between spoken and written production. In addition, while considerable differences could be noted across L1 background in the spoken data, factors such as presence/absence of auxiliary, verb type (e.g. intransitive, copular/linking) and lexis were found to be most important for predicting adverb placement in the written data. Only very limited evidence of L1 transfer was found in the learners' writing, suggesting that advanced learners have largely mastered the distributional preferences of adverbs.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)155-184
Number of pages30
JournalInternational Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Volume25
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 28 2020
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Adverb placement
  • L1 transfer
  • L2 writing
  • Learner corpus research
  • Novice writing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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