The influence of L1 Dutch on cohesion in L2 German academic writing: A contrastive corpus-based analysis
Date:
Abstract
Novice L2 writers tend to rely on L1 strategies to create cohesive texts, which may differ from strategies used in the L2 (Roberts et al., 2008). One of these strategies is coreference (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). Research on coreference in L2 German has been scarce to date in stark contrast to L2 English (e.g., Grüter et al., 2017; He, 2020). The few existing studies on L2 German focus on specific coreference types, such as possessives (e.g., Fabricius-Hansen et al., 2021) or pronominal adverbs (Belz, 2005; Strobl, 2019) and on heterogeneous learner groups. To date, there is no comprehensive study on L2 German coreference use available.
Our study aims to fill this gap by comparing coreference use of L2 writers with L1 Dutch, L2 writers with heterogenous L1s other than Dutch and L1 German writers. The analysis is based on the Belgisches Deutschkorpus (Beldeko) and the two subcorpora of the German summary corpus (GerSumCo L1 & L2). Coreference was manually annotated with the help of a newly developed annotation system that combines categories of different frameworks (e.g., Becher, 2011; Kunz, 2010; Reznicek, 2013), such as antecedent types, coreferential expression, degree of coreference explicitness, and coreferential relations.
The analyses via R revealed differences in coreference use, which distinguish L2 German writers with heterogeneous L1s from those with L1 Dutch and L1 German: They use fewer proper nouns (23% vs. 31% and 34%) and more pronouns (40% vs. 34% and 27%) than the two other groups. They also use less repetitions (21% vs. 28% and 33%) and more personal pronouns (40% vs. 34% and 27%) for coreference. Additionally, we find more intra-sentential relations (29%) when compared to the L1 group (24%) and the L2 group with L1 Dutch (23%). In the presentation, we will discuss these results in light of L1 Dutch influence.
References
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