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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 25:2 (2020) ► pp.156–185

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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
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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
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.19131.lar
Abstract
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 (Louvain Corpus of Research Articles). Corpus compiled at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, UCLouvain. [URL]), two native-speaker student corpora (BAWE (British Academic Written English corpus). Corpus compiled at the Universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes in 2004–2007. [URL] and LOCNEC) and two learner corpora (VESPA (Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase). Corpus administered at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics at Université catholique de Louvain. [URL] 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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