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Article published In: International Journal of Learner Corpus Research
Vol. 10:2 (2024) ► pp.338–364

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The effect of linguistic and extralinguistic features on EFL adverb placement

A partial replication study of Larsson et al. (2020)

 | Northern Arizona University
 | Northern Arizona University
Published online: 23 May 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.00046.ozk
Abstract
Larsson, T., Callies, M., Hasselgård, H., Laso, J. N., Vuuren, S., Verdaguer, I., & Paquot, M. (2020). Adverb placement in EFL academic writing: Going beyond syntactic transfer. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 25(2), 155–184. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar emphasize the importance of taking linguistic variables (e.g., verb type) into consideration in studies of adverb placement. This study looks at the positional distribution of 15 epistemic adverbs from texts written by L1 Turkish, German, and English students, with the aim of testing whether the findings from Larsson et al. can be generalized to a different register (argumentative writing) and a typologically more distant language (Turkish). We also revisit the question of whether there is L1 transfer. The results confirm Larsson et al.’s finding that the main predictors of adverb placement are linguistic, although some register differences were noted, such as higher frequencies of adverbs in the argumentative texts. Furthermore, the L1 Turkish students made especially frequent use of the clause-initial position (e.g., probably she is here).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research on adverbs and adverb placement
  • 3.Corpora and method
    • 3.1Corpora
    • 3.2Method
      • 3.2.1Classifying adverb placement
      • 3.2.2Coding for linguistic features
      • 3.2.3Tests of inter-rater reliability and statistical analysis
      • 3.2.4Frameworks for detection of possible L1 transfer
      • 3.2.5Typological differences: English vs. Turkish and German
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1The effect of linguistic and extralinguistic factors on adverb placement
    • 4.2The possible effect of register
    • 4.3The possible effect of L1 transfer
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (43)
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