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Article published In: International Journal of Learner Corpus Research
Vol. 5:1 (2019) ► pp.33–62

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Extraposition in learner and expert writing

Exploring (in)formality and the impact of register

 | Université catholique de Louvain | Uppsala University
 | University of Gävle
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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: 13 March 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.17014.lar
Abstract
Subject extraposition (e.g. it is important to remember) is generally considered to be a formal construction that learners, whose writing is often said to be overly informal, have been found to struggle with. This study investigates to what extent register and text type can be used to explore learners’ reportedly “informal” use of this construction. Learner writing is compared to expert writing from several different registers and to native-speaker student writing. The results show that there are important differences across both registers and text types. Furthermore, while the learners’ use is most like that of the experts’ academic writing, certain similarities to the non-academic registers were also noted. The results additionally suggest that earlier claims about the informal status of learner writing seem mainly to have been influenced by the text types included in the corpora previously investigated.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research on extraposition
  • 3.Material and method
    • 3.1Corpora used in the study
    • 3.2Method
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1A comparison across registers
      • 4.1.1An overview
      • 4.1.2A more detailed analysis of the adjective-verb pairings
    • 4.2A comparison across text types
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (46)
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