Adverb placement in L2 spoken production: The effect of linguistic and extralinguistic factors
(2022) ICAME43 — Location: Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK (27.July.2022)
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- Authors
Larsson, Tove 
- Abstract
- Despite being a rich source of information about potential syntactic first-language (L1) transfer, studies of adverb placement in second-language (L2) users’ production are few and far between (though notable exceptions include Rankin, 2010, Hasselgård, 2015, and Larsson et al., 2020). What is more, existing research has tended to focus on misplaced adverbs in written data and rarely considered factors such as mode, adverb type, and the linguistic context surrounding the adverb of interest. The present study starts out where previous studies left off and looks at adverb placement in intermediate to advanced learners’ spoken language production, as outlined below. In Larsson et al.’s (2020) study on adverb placement in academic writing, only minor differences were noticed across L1 and L2 production, which led the authors to conclude that while certain traces of L1 transfer persisted, L2 writers seem to have largely mastered adverb placement in English. However, the production circumstances of formal writing are such that there is ample opportunity for pre-planning and post-editing of the text, while online spoken language production offers no or very limited opportunities of this sort. It is thus reasonable to expect that effects of L1 transfer might still be discernable in spoken data. Furthermore, Larsson et al. (2020) found linguistic features (e.g., subject type, presence/absence of auxiliary) to be more important predictors of adverb placement in writing than extralinguistic factors (e.g., L1 background). It is unclear whether we can expect these patterns to hold true also in speech. Against this background, the present study sets out to explore two research questions: • What extralinguistic (e.g., L1 background) and linguistic factors (e.g., verb type, presence/absence of auxiliaries) help predict the positional distribution of the adverbs investigated in the spoken production of L1 and L2 students? • What evidence (if any) of L1 transfer is found in spoken language production of advanced learners of English? Specifically, we studied the positional distribution of 15 epistemic adverbs (e.g., maybe, apparently, actually; Granath, 2002) in spoken L1 English data from LOCNEC and in L2 data from six L1 backgrounds (French, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, German, and Spanish) from LINDSEI (Gilquin, De Cock, & Granger, 2010). The study used Hasselgård’s (2010) syntactic classification of adverbs, the analytical framework developed in Larsson et al. (2020; available at www.iris-database.org), and Jarvis’s (2000) framework for transfer identification. Our 4,002 tokens were coded manually by two trained raters, and we used Random Forests to examine the data. The results show that similarly to Larsson et al.’s findings for the written data, the linguistic variables proved to be the best predictors, with adverb type (e.g., clearly, importantly) and presence/absence of an auxiliary verb being particularly important. Only very limited traces of L1 transfer were found (e.g., instances of SVAO word order for speakers of languages that allow verb raising, i.e., French and Spanish). The present study helps broaden our understanding of the interplay between linguistic and extralinguistic factors and the production constraints of spoken production, thus providing one more piece of the puzzle that makes up adverb placement. References Gilquin, G., De Cock, S., & Granger, S. (Eds.). (2010). LINDSEI: Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage. UCL Presses. Granath, S. (2002). The position of the adverb certainly will make a difference. English Today, 18(1), 25–30. Hasselgård, H. (2015). Lexicogrammatical features of adverbs in advanced learner English. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 166(1), 163–189. Hasselgård, H. (2010). Adjunct Adverbials in English. Cambridge University Press. Jarvis S. (2000). Methodological rigor in the study of transfer: identifying L1 influence in the interlanguage lexicon. Language Learning, 50(2), 245–309. Larsson, T., Callies, M., Hasselgård, H., Laso, N. J., Van 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. Rankin, T. (2010). Advanced learner corpora data and grammar teaching: Adverb placement. In M.C. Campoy, B. Belles-Fortuno, & M.L. GeaValor (Eds.), Corpus-based Approaches to English Language Teaching (pp. 205–215). Continuum.
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Larsson, T., Callies, M., Dixon, T., Hasselgard, H., Hober, N., Laso, N. J., Verdaguer, I., van Vuuren, S., & Paquot, M. (2022). Adverb placement in L2 spoken production: The effect of linguistic and extralinguistic factors. ICAME43, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/222601