Adverbial markers and tone in L1 and L2 students' writing

In the past several decades, analyses of large corpora of published written texts in English have allowed for new insights into the meanings, uses, and functions of adverbials of all types. However, far less is known about the uses of adverbials in second language (L2) text. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of deictic, modifying, and intensifying adverbials, as well as several semantic classes of adverb clauses, and compares their median frequency rates in academic essays written by first-year NS and academically-advanced NNS students. The analysis focuses on NS and NNS uses of twelve semantic and syntactic classes of adverbials. The greatest pronounced differences between the essays of NSs and those of NNSs are identified in the frequency rates of amplifiers and emphatic adverbs, both of which are very common in informal conversations. Because for most NNS academically-oriented learners, the greatest amount of exposure to L2 usage takes place in conversational discourse, the frequency rates of adverb clauses in L2 texts is determined by the frequency of a particular clause type in the conversational genre, i.e. the more common certain types of adverb clauses in conversational discourse, the greater the likelihood of their high frequency rates in L2 academic essays. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.