A comparison of lexical specificity in the communication verbs of L1 English and TE student writing.
Abstract
Although verbs play a pivotal role in the construction and understanding of clauses,
lexical specificity is rarely investigated in this class. Instead researchers prefer to investigate
lexical specificity in the noun class. It is important that lexical specificity be investigated in the verb
class, as it can provide important insights into speakers’ linguistic knowledge. The aim of the study
was to investigate specificity in the communication verbs in two corpora: the Louvain Corpus of
Native English Essays (LOCNESS) which is made up of texts written by a subpopulation of first
language (L1) English users and the Tswana Learner English Corpus (TLE)2 which is made up of
texts written by a subpopulation of Setswana English (TE) users. The results (interpreted from a
broadly systemic functional cognitive perspective) indicated that there is less lexical specificity in
the communication verbs of TE users than L1 English users
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10394/17899http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2989/16073614.2011.633362
DOI:10.2989/16073614.2011.633362
Collections
- Faculty of Humanities [2033]