On the basis of a longitudinal corpus of English produced by German intermediate learners, the present paper explores how noun phrase (NP) complexity develops in terms of global measures of complexity (length, number of modifiers per 1,000 words) in learner data on an intermediate level of competence and describes how the use of individual NP-modification structures changes as learners progress through their three final years of secondary school. An additional objective is to test Biber et al.’s (2011) hypothesized stages of acquisition against our data of intermediate learner English, complementing the data of advanced learner English provided by Parkinson & Musgrave (2014). Our results show that global measures of NP complexity remain stable as learners progress from grades 10 to 12. Zooming in on individual learners and features, the results lend tentative support to Biber et al.’s (2011) stages of acquisition. However, individual variation influences the frequency of noun-phrasal modifiers.

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The noun phrase (NP) is at the heart of several studies investigating regional variation in varieties of English. While so far the bulk of research has focused on isolated structural features, the present study is a comparative analysis of NP complexity across varieties of English. NP complexity is compared across five regional varieties and four text categories, based on data from the International Corpus of English. The study adopts a multinomial regression approach, which takes into consideration the interaction of three potential predictors: syntactic function, text type, and variety. The results underline the need for text-type-sensitive studies and add to an understanding of syntactic contact phenomena in varieties of English. More specifically, we find marked differences in the predictive power of the variables and illustrate how focusing on the interaction of syntactic functions, text type and regional variety contributes to a systematic description of variation in the NP in world Englishes.

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