The role of adverbial clauses as a feature of clausal complexity in L2 academic writing: A usage-based, discourse perspective

Abstract

Research on clausal complexity in L2 writing has traditionally employed a reductionist approach by encapsulating all types of finite dependent clauses under the rubric of subordination, without distinguishing between their syntactic functions and with participle adverbial clauses excluded from clausal features. Taking a functional, usage-based approach to clausal complexity, this study sets out to investigate the frequency of finite adverbial clauses of three semantic relations and participle adverbial clauses of certain structural types in L2 academic writing, in a corpus-assisted comparison with published research articles. Results show that students use both finite and participle adverbial clauses less frequently than published writers overall. The study then tries to provide a rich textual analysis to functionally interpret the low representation of adverbial clauses in student writing. Implications for L2 writing pedagogy and L2 syntactic complexity research are discussed.