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Article published In:
Corpus-based Approaches to Spoken L2 Production: Evidence from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus
Edited by Vaclav Brezina, Dana Gablasova and Tony McEnery
[International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 5:2] 2019
► pp. 253–279

Certainty adverbs in spoken learner language

The role of tasks and proficiency

| University of Cambridge
| University of Jaén

Our research examines the use of three stance adverbs of certainty (actually, really and obviously) across B1, B2 and C1 levels in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus (TLC). Particularly, we examined the occurrence of these adverbs in the subset of Spanish L1 speakers from Mexico and Spain. Really, actually and obviously were found to display a distinctive frequency of use across different proficiency levels and the different speaking tasks analysed. Dialogic tasks favoured a more frequent use of really and actually, while obviously was hardly used. Qualitative analyses of the pragmatic functions of really and actually revealed that there is an increase in the use of meanings to express hedging in really and factualness in actually across the proficiency levels. Our research confirms the finding in Gablasova et al. (2017) that the type of speaking task conditions speakers’ repertoire of linguistic devices, although we argue that this conditioning operates on different levels.

Keywords: Spanish EFL learners, stance adverbs, hedging, task effect
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research methodology
    • 2.1The Trinity Lancaster Corpus
    • 2.2Corpus query, data extraction and quantitative data analysis
    • 2.3Qualitative data analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Descriptive statistics
    • 3.2Inferential statistics
      • 3.2.1Levels B1/B2
      • 3.2.2Levels B2/C1
      • 3.2.3Levels B1/C1
      • 3.2.4Summary of findings
      • 3.2.5Looking at L1 nationalities: Spanish and Mexican students compared
    • 3.3Functions and position
      • 3.3.1Really
      • 3.3.2Actually
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Frequency of use increase and tasks (RQ 1 & 2)
    • 4.2Functions across proficiency levels: The emergence of hedging and non-epistemic meanings in the higher proficiency group (RQ 1 & 2)
    • 4.3Same L1, different varieties (RQ 3)
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 September 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.17019.per
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