Adverb placement in EFL academic writing
Going beyond syntactic transfer
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.
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
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