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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 25:1 (2020) ► pp.4–35

Noun phrase complexity in young Spanish EFL learners’ writing

Complementing syntactic complexity indices with corpus-driven analyses

| University of Jaén
| University of Cambridge

The research reported in this article examines Noun Phrase (NP) syntactic complexity in the writing of Spanish EFL secondary school learners in Grades 7, 8, 11 and 12 in the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage. Two methods were combined: a manual parsing of NPs and an automatic analysis of NP indices using the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity (TAASSC). Our results revealed that it is in premodifying slots that syntactic complexity in NPs develops. We argue that two measures, (i) nouns and modifiers (a syntactic complexity index) and (ii) determiner + multiple premodification + head (a NP type obtained as a result of a corpus-driven analysis), can be used as indices of syntactic complexity in young Spanish EFL learner language development. Besides offering a learner-language-driven taxonomy of NP syntactic complexity, the paper underscores the strength of using combined methods in SLA research.

Keywords: syntactic complexity, learner language, NP syntactic complexity taxonomy, automatic analysis of complexity, TAASSC
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Nouns in learner language research
    • 2.1Complexity and NPs
    • 2.2Defining complexity in the NP
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus
    • 3.2Syntactic complexity indices
    • 3.3Corpus-driven manual analysis of NPs
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Analysing syntactic complexity across grades
      • 4.1.1Using NP syntactic complexity indices in TAASSC
      • 4.1.2Manual parsing of NPs: Corpus-driven classification of NP types
    • 4.2NP complexity in secondary school learner writing: Criterial features
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1NP types and grades
    • 5.2The use of complex structures in each NP group and grade
    • 5.3Number of non-target-like NP types used and grade
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17058.die
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