Abstract
This paper presents a learner corpus-based study of English particularizing adverbials, a comparatively under-researched topic with regard to adverbial placement. Particularizers such as especially, particularly, and in particular highlight the fact that an utterance is confined to the part that is focused. Pedagogically-oriented sources and corpus-informed dictionaries state that especially cannot appear at the beginning of a sentence before the subject. The primary goal of this study is to determine whether misused sentence-initial Especially is a production tendency associated with learners’ first language (L1) or a universal feature of interlanguage development. To this end, I examined 3,800 argumentative essays in the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE), which were written by English as a foreign language (EFL) learners from Korea, China, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand. The learner participants in the ICNALE are classified according to four English proficiency levels. In order to identify the patterns of overuse and underuse, EFL learners’ essays were also compared to 200 essays written by L1 English novice writers in the ICNALE. Both L1 background and English proficiency significantly influenced the frequency of misused sentence-initial Especially although the effect size was small in the case of the latter. The relatively high rate of misuse in L1 Korean writers’ essays can be attributed to L1 transfer, the effect of which is confirmed by an investigation of a Korean language corpus. The findings suggest that formal L2 instruction based on data-driven learning may be an effective way to remedy the misuse of sentence-initial Especially.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1071-1100 |
Number of pages | 30 |
Journal | Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics |
Volume | 24 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2024 |
Bibliographical note
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Keywords
- adverb placement
- ICNALE
- learner corpus
- particularizer
- restrictive adverb
- second language writing