Suchergebnisse

The present study empirically scrutinizes the fixed natural order of grammatical morphemes relying on a manual analysis of an EFL learner corpus. Specifically, we test whether the accuracy order of L2 grammatical morphemes in the case of L1 Turkish speakers of English deviates from Krashen's (1977) natural order and whether proficiency levels play a role in the order of acquisition of these morphemes. With this in mind, we focus on the (in)accuracy of nine English grammatical morphemes with 2883 cases manually tagged by the UAM Corpus Tool in the written exam scripts of Turkish learners of English. The results based on target-like use scores provide evidence for deviation from what is widely believed to be a set order of acquisition of these grammatical morphemes by second language learners. In light of such findings, we challenge the view that the internally driven processes of mastering grammatical morphemes in English for interlanguage users are largely independent of their L1. Regardless of L2 grammar proficiency in our data, the observed accuracy of some morphemes ranked low in comparison with the so-called natural order. These grammatical morphemes were almost exclusively non-existent features in participants' mother tongue (e.g., third person singular –s, articles and the irregular past tense forms), thus suggesting the influence of L1 in this respect.

This study is a corpus-based investigation of how epistemic stance is signaled in medical discourse. In particular, we compiled a discipline-specific corpus of research articles from different fields of medicine ranging from anatomy to endocrinology to explore how particular resources are employed by authors to index their level of (un)certainty towards their propositions. The corpus of the study contained only the results and discussion sections of 100 published medical research articles, totaling approximately 215,000 words. The results of the corpus analyses showed that there was very frequent use of modal auxiliaries by the writers in the field of medicine to express their extra-propositional modality. It was also found that medical researchers did not employ a greater number of boosters to amplify their commitment to the propositions conveyed to the readers. However, the rhetorical uses of boosters were shown to be strategic to portray their higher level of confidence for the sake of credibility and interaction. The findings and implications are discussed with a particular focus on the teaching of writing as a part of English for academic purposes.