Chapter published in:
Beyond Concordance Lines: Corpora in language education
Edited by Pascual Pérez-Paredes and Geraldine Mark
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 102] 2021
► pp. 75–96

Chapter 4
L2 development of -ing clauses

A longitudinal study of Norwegian learners

| University of Oslo

Although -ing clauses are frequent in English, their acquisition has not received much attention, and there is a lack of longitudinal studies and detailed explorations of cross-linguistic influence. This longitudinal case study of five young Norwegian students reveals a developmental sequence for the syntactic roles of -ing clauses: complements of aspectual verbs > complements of other verbs and prepositions > bare adjuncts and postmodifiers of nouns > subjects. The sequence may arise from a combination of frequencies in the input and grammatical selection. Syntactic restrictions on Norwegian present participle clauses are not mirrored in the acquisition of -ing clauses, indicating that the students do not make an interlingual identification. Cross-linguistic influence is evident mainly in late acquisition and infrequent use of -ing clauses.

Keywords: -ing clauses, developmental sequence, cross-linguistic influence, second language acquisition
Article outline
  • Introduction
    • -ing clauses
  • Second language acquisition and use of -ing clauses
  • English -ing clauses and Norwegian present participle clauses compared
  • Research questions
  • Material and method
  • Findings
    • Developmental stages
    • Individual differences
    • Cross-linguistic influence
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 December 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.102.04dir
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