Adverb placement in EFL academic writing
Going beyond syntactic transfer
Marcus Callies | University of Bremen
Hilde Hasselgård | University of Oslo
Natalia Judith Laso | University of Barcelona
Sanne van Vuuren | Radboud University Nijmegen
Isabel Verdaguer | University of Barcelona
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
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
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.19131.lar
Full-text
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