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Volume 5, Issue 1
  • ISSN 2215-1478
  • E-ISSN: 2215-1486
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Abstract

Abstract

Subject extraposition (e.g. ) is generally considered to be a formal construction that learners, whose writing is often said to be overly informal, have been found to struggle with. This study investigates to what extent register and text type can be used to explore learners’ reportedly “informal” use of this construction. Learner writing is compared to expert writing from several different registers and to native-speaker student writing. The results show that there are important differences across both registers and text types. Furthermore, while the learners’ use is most like that of the experts’ academic writing, certain similarities to the non-academic registers were also noted. The results additionally suggest that earlier claims about the informal status of learner writing seem mainly to have been influenced by the text types included in the corpora previously investigated.

© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
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2019-03-13
2024-12-11

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Extraposition in learner and expert writing
International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 5, 33 (2019); https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.17014.lar
/content/journals/10.1075/ijlcr.17014.lar
/content/journals/10.1075/ijlcr.17014.lar
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): expert writing; extraposition; informality; learner writing; register

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