Article published in:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 25:2 (2020) ► pp. 156–185

Adverb placement in EFL academic writing

Going beyond syntactic transfer

| Uppsala University | UCLouvain
| University of Bremen
| University of Oslo
| University of Barcelona
| Radboud University Nijmegen
| University of Barcelona
| FNRS | UCLouvain

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.

Keywords: adverb placement, novice writing, L2 writing, L1 transfer, learner corpus research
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Epistemic adverbs and L1 transfer
    • 2.1Epistemic adverbs
    • 2.2Typological differences between the L1s
  • 3.Corpora and method
    • 3.1Corpora
    • 3.2Method
      • 3.2.1Frameworks for the study of L1 transfer
      • 3.2.2Categorizing adverb placement
      • 3.2.3Coding for linguistic context
      • 3.2.4The coding procedure and inter-rater reliability
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Investigating differences across modes
    • 4.2Investigating positional distribution in the written data
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 28 August 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.19131.lar
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