Resumen de Concessive adverbial clauses in L2 academic writing
In a recent study, Wulff & Gries (2011) put forward the constructionist definition of accuracy in L2 production as the selection of a construction in its preferred context within a particular target variety and genre. By focusing on the use of concessive adverbial clauses in L2 academic writing, the current study takes up this definition of accuracy in L2 production and sets out to explore whether, and to what extent, the 'genre-specific construction' (i.e. genre-specific repository of symbolic form-function alignments) of advanced German learners of academic English is similar/different to that of native expert academic writers of English. To this end, all instances of concessive adverbial clauses were extracted from a 216,418 word-token learner corpus and coded for the various factors proposed in the literature. For comparison purposes, a data set of all relevant data points was distilled from a native expert corpus of the same size and annotated in terms of the same factors. The two annotated data sets were then submitted to a Hierarchical Configural Frequency Analysis (Gries 2009). A comparison of the findings revealed a slightly different set of 'entrenched' adverbial concessive clauses in the learner corpus, suggesting that the learners' genre-specific panoply of certain constructional types is still not fully established. In accordance with Wulff & Gries (2011), the findings presented here give support to a usage-based constructionist approach as a promising and viable way of measuring accuracy in L2 production.
