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Article published In:
International Journal of Learner Corpus Research
Vol. 4:1 (2018) ► pp.82–111

The development of phrasal complexity in German intermediate learners of English

| University of Marburg
| University of Münster

On the basis of a longitudinal corpus of English produced by German intermediate learners, the present paper explores how noun phrase (NP) complexity develops in terms of global measures of complexity (length, number of modifiers per 1,000 words) in learner data on an intermediate level of competence and describes how the use of individual NP-modification structures changes as learners progress through their three final years of secondary school. An additional objective is to test Biber et al.’s (2011) hypothesized stages of acquisition against our data of intermediate learner English, complementing the data of advanced learner English provided by Parkinson & Musgrave (2014). Our results show that global measures of NP complexity remain stable as learners progress from grades 10 to 12. Zooming in on individual learners and features, the results lend tentative support to Biber et al.’s (2011) stages of acquisition. However, individual variation influences the frequency of noun-phrasal modifiers.

Keywords: learner corpus, noun phrase, linguistic complexity, grammatical development, intermediate proficiency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Complexity, syntactic complexity and noun phrase complexity
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Informants
    • 3.3Measuring noun phrase complexity
    • 3.4Noun phrase extraction and annotation
    • 3.5Statistical analysis
  • 4.Noun phrase complexity in learner language
  • 5.Emergence of noun phrase modification structures
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 31 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.16011.kre
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