Abstract
The diversity of syntactic units in second language has attracted much scholarly attention. Most existing studies on syntactic diversity have focused on only a small number of syntactic structures, and it is difficult to find studies that consider the full range of syntactic dependencies present in the dataset. Based on a syntactic annotated interlanguage corpus that we constructed, this paper is a quantitative study of dependencies in English-speaking Chinese learners’ interlanguage across proficiency levels. We fit the frequency distributions of dependency type, word class (both as dependent and governor), verb as a governor, and noun as a dependent with a modified right-truncated Zipf-Alekseev distribution and Zipf’s law. Our findings show that: (1) from the mathematical model, interlanguage followed distributional regularities like natural languages in terms of the syntactic structure distribution; (2) most of the determination coefficients’ R2 were high, indicating that the investigated distributions in interlanguage fit the distributional law finding in natural languages. This also demonstrated that both interlanguages and natural languages consistently conform to the law of linguistic diversity and uniformity; (3) the dependency relation distribution parameters a and b manifest the developmental trend of L2 learners’ proficiency levels, demonstrating that the parameters had universal applicability in reflecting interlanguage proficiency.
Funding source: The National Social Science Fund of China
Award Identifier / Grant number: 21BYY113
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Research funding: This research is supported by The National Social Science Fund of China (Grant No. 21BYY113).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Production of vowel reduction by Jordanian–Arabic speakers of English: an acoustic study
- The linguistic realization of focus in Uyghur: can the two focusing strategies be used interchangeably?
- Thematic role mappings in metaphor variation: contrasting English bake and Spanish hornear
- A probability distribution of dependencies in interlanguage
- Croatian (mor)phonotactic word-medial consonant clusters in the early lexicon
- The impact of gestural representation of metaphor schema on metaphor comprehension
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- Mandarin Chinese peer advice online: a study of gender disparity
- The pragmatics of ‘it is well’ in Nigerian English
- Active verbs with inanimate, text-denoting subjects in Polish and English abstracts of research articles in linguistics
- Book Reviews
- Book review. Melissa Yoong. 2020. Professional discourses, gender and identity in women’s media. Springer Nature Switzerland. 149pp. 49.99€, ISBN 978-3-030-55543-6.
- The status, roles, and dynamics of Englishes in Asia