Examining individual variation in learner production data: A few programmatic pointers for corpus-based analyses using the example of adverbial clause ordering

Abstract

This study examines the variable positioning of a finite adverbial subordinate clause and its main clause with the subordinate clause either preceding or following the main clause in native versus nonnative English. Specifically, we contrast causal, concessive, conditional, and temporal adverbial clauses produced by German and Chinese learners of English with those produced by native speakers. We examined 2,362 attestations from the Chinese and German subsections of the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger, Dagneaux, Meunier, & Paquot, 2009) and from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (Granger, 1998). All instances were annotated for the ordering, the subordinate clause type, the lengths of the main and subordinate clauses, the first language of the speakers, the conjunction used, and the file it originated from (as a proxy for the speaker producing the sentence so as to be able to study individual and lexical variation). The results of a two-step regression modeling protocol suggest that learners behave most nativelike with causal clauses and struggle most with conditional and concessive clauses; in addition, learners make more non-nativelike choices when the main and subordinate clause are of about equal length.

Adverbial Clauses in English Cookbooks

“…Guidepost usually comes before the information that the writer wants to emphasize, so it is the same as given-new information mentioned earlier. Within the same text variety, Gries and Wulff (2021) used academic essays written by English native speakers to study adverbial clauses. The results show that temporal adverbial clauses mostly occur in the initial position.…”

“…Adverbials in English can be placed in different positions; either initial positions or final positions (Park, 2002;Diessel, 2005;Mala, 2005;Popa, 2008;Saebø, 2011;Filipova, 2012;Wiechmann & Kerz, 2013;Tuchscherer, 2016;Přibylová, 2019;Megitt, 2019;Gries & Wulff, 2021;Yuan 2020), such as (2).…”