Article published in:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 25:2 (2020) ► pp. 155–184

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
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

Full-text

Adverb placement in EFL academic writing
References

[ p. 180 ]References

Aijmer, K.
(2002) Modality in advanced Swedish learners’ written interlanguage. In S. Granger, J. Hung, & S. Petch-Tyson (Eds.), Computer Learner Corpora, Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching (pp. 55–76). John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, H.
(2008) Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics Using R. Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
BAWE (British Academic Written English corpus)
. Corpus compiled at the Universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes in 2004–2007 http://​www2​.warwick​.ac​.uk​/fac​/soc​/al​/research​/collect​/bawe/
Biber, D.
(2006) Stance in spoken and written university registers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5(2), 97–116. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E.
(1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman.Google Scholar
Callies, M.
(2009) Information Highlighting in Advanced Learner English: The Syntax-Pragmatics Interface in Second Language Acquisition. John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Celce-Murcia, M., Larsen-Freeman, D., & Williams, H. A.
(1999) The Grammar Book: An ESL/EFL Teacher’s Course (2nd ed.). Heinle & Heinle.Google Scholar
De Cock, S.
(2004) Preferred sequences of words in NS and NNS speech. Belgian Journal of English Language and Literatures (BELL), New Series, 2, 225–246.Google Scholar
Diani, G.
(2008) Emphasizers in spoken and written academic discourse: The case of really . International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13(3), 296–331. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Downing, A.
(2001) “Surely you knew!” Surely as a marker of evidentiality and stance. Functions of Language, 8(2), 253–285. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dupont, M.
(2019) Conjunctive Markers of Contrast in English and French: From Syntax to Lexis and Discourse. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Université catholique de Louvain.Google Scholar
Faarlund, J. T., Lie, S., & Vannebo, K. I.
(1997) Norsk Referansegrammatikk [Norwegian Reference Grammar]. Universitetsforlaget.Google Scholar
Fleiss, J. L.
(1971) Measuring nominal scale agreement among many raters. Psychological Bulletin, 76(5), 378–382. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gamer, M., Lemon, J., Fellows, I., & Singh, P.
(2012)  irr: Various coefficients of interrater reliability and agreement. R package version 0.84.1. https://​CRAN​.R​-project​.org​/package​=irr
Gilquin, G., De Cock, S., & Granger, S.
(Eds.) (2010) LINDSEI: Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage. UCL Presses.Google Scholar
Glynn, D.
(2014) Correspondence analysis: An exploratory technique for identifying usage patterns. In D. Glynn & J. A. Robinson (Eds.), Corpus Methods in Cognitive Semantics: Quantitative Studies in Polysemy and Synonymy (pp. 443–485). John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Granath, S.
(2002) The position of the adverb certainly will make a difference. English Today, 18(1), 25–30.Google Scholar
[ p. 181 ]
Granger, S.
(2015) Contrastive interlanguage analysis: A reappraisal. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, 1(1), 7–24. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Granger, S. & Rayson, P.
(1998) Automatic profiling of learner texts. In S. Granger (Ed.), Learner English on Computer (pp. 119–131). Longman.Google Scholar
Gries, S. Th.
to appear). On classification trees and random forests in corpus linguistics: Some words of caution and suggestions for improvement. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.
Hasselgård, H.
(2009) Thematic choice and expressions of stance in English argumentative texts by Norwegian learners. In K. Aijmer (Ed.), Corpora and Language Teaching (pp. 121–139). John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2010) Adjunct Adverbials in English. Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2015) Lexicogrammatical features of adverbs in advanced learner English. ITL International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 166(1), 163–189. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, J.A.
(1986) A Comparative Typology of English and German: Unifying the Contrasts. Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Heuboeck, A., Holmes, J., & Nesi, H.
(2008) The BAWE corpus manual. http://​www​.reading​.ac​.uk​/internal​/appling​/bawe​/BAWE​.documentation​.pdf
Hunston, S.
(2007) Using a corpus to investigate stance quantitatively and qualitatively. In R. Englebretson (Ed.), Stance Taking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction (pp. 27–48). John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jacobson, S.
(1975) Factors Influencing the Placement of English Adverbs in Relation to Auxiliaries: A Study in Variation. Almqvist & Wiksell International.Google Scholar
Jarvis, S.
(2000) Methodological rigor in the study of transfer: Identifying L1 influence in the interlanguage lexicon. Language Learning, 50(2), 245–309. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jarvis, S., & Pavlenko, A.
(2008) Crosslinguistic Influence in Language and Cognition. Routledge. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Johansson, S., Ebeling, J., & Oksefjell, S.
(1999) English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus: Manual. Department of British and American Studies, University of Oslo.Google Scholar
Landis, J. R., & Koch, G. G.
(1977) The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. Biometrics, 33, 159–174. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Larsson, T.
(2017)  The importance of, it is important that or importantly? The use of morphologically related stance markers in learner and expert writing. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(1), 57–84. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Larsson, T., Paquot, M., & Plonsky, L.
forthcoming). Inter-rater reliability in learner corpus research: Insights from a collaborative study on adverb placement. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research.
Le, S., Josse, J., & Husson, F.
(2008) FactoMineR: An R package for multivariate analysis. Journal of Statistical Software, 25(1), 1–18. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Levshina, N.
(2015) How to Do Linguistics with R: Data Exploration and Statistical Analysis. John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
LOCRA (Louvain Corpus of Research Articles)
Corpus compiled at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, UCLouvain. https://​uclouvain​.be​/en​/research​-institutes​/ilc​/cecl​/locra​.html
[ p. 182 ]
Odlin, T.
(1989) Language Transfer: Cross-Linguistic Influence in Language Learning. Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Osborne, J.
(2008) Adverb placement in post-intermediate learner English: A contrastive study of learner corpora. In G. Gilquin, S. Papp, & M. B. Díez-Bedmar (Eds.), Linking up Contrastive and Learner Corpus Research (pp. 127–146). Rodopi. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Paquot, M.
(2007) EAP Vocabulary in EFL learner Writing: From Extraction to Analysis: A Phraseology-oriented Approach [Unpublished doctoral thesis]. Université catholique de Louvain.Google Scholar
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J.
(1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman.Google Scholar
R Core Team
(2019) R: A language and environment for statistical computing [Computer software]. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://​www​.R​-project​.org/
Rankin, T.
(2010) Advanced learner corpora data and grammar teaching: Adverb placement. In M. C. Campoy, B. Belles-Fortuno, & M. L. GeaValor (Eds.), Corpus-based Approaches to English Language Teaching (pp. 205–215). Continuum.Google Scholar
Selinker, L.
(1969) Language transfer. General Linguistics, 9, 67–92.Google Scholar
Strobl, C., Boulesteix, A.-L., Kneib, T., Augustin, T., & Zeileis, A.
(2008) Conditional variable importance for random forests. BMC Bioinformatics, 9(307). http://​www​.biomedcentral​.com​/1471​-2105​/9​/307. Crossref
van Vuuren, S.
(2017) Traces of Transfer? Pragmatic Development in the Use of Initial Adverbials in the Interlanguage of Advanced Dutch Learners of English. LOT.Google Scholar
VESPA (Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase)
Corpus administered at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics at Université catholique de Louvain. http://​www​.uclouvain​.be​/en​-cecl​-vespa​.html
Waters, C.
(2013) Transatlantic variation in English adverb placement. Language Variation and Change, 25, 179–200. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
White, L.
(1991) Adverb placement in second language acquisition: Some effects of positive and negative evidence in the classroom. Interlanguage Studies Bulletin (Utrecht), 7 (2), 133–161.Google Scholar
Zifonun, G., Hoffmann, L., & Strecker, B.
(1997) Grammatik der Deutschen Sprache [Grammar of the German Language]. Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Larsson, Tove, Magali Paquot & Luke Plonsky
2020. Inter-rater reliability in Learner Corpus Research. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 6:2 ► pp. 237 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 april 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.