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Volume 25, Issue 1
  • ISSN 1384-6655
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9811
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Abstract

Abstract

The research reported in this article examines Noun Phrase (NP) syntactic complexity in the writing of Spanish EFL secondary school learners in Grades 7, 8, 11 and 12 in the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage. Two methods were combined: a manual parsing of NPs and an automatic analysis of NP indices using the (). Our results revealed that it is in premodifying slots that syntactic complexity in NPs develops. We argue that two measures, (i) nouns and modifiers (a syntactic complexity index) and (ii) determiner + multiple premodification + head (a NP type obtained as a result of a corpus-driven analysis), can be used as indices of syntactic complexity in young Spanish EFL learner language development. Besides offering a learner-language-driven taxonomy of NP syntactic complexity, the paper underscores the strength of using combined methods in SLA research.

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2020-04-16
2024-12-04

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Noun phrase complexity in young Spanish EFL learners’ writing
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 25, 4 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17058.die
/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.17058.die
/content/journals/10.1075/ijcl.17058.die
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): automatic analysis of complexity; learner language; NP syntactic complexity taxonomy; syntactic complexity; TAASSC

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