Clause-initial Position in Academic Texts written by Advanced Dutch EFL users of English.

Abstract

The clause-initial position in texts written by Dutch English as a Foreign Language users has been researched with the use of corpora. Corpus research is useful in doing second language acquisition research, especially when it comes to linguistic phenomena such as word order. The V2 construction in Dutch ensures that the verb is always in second position in regular sentences. This might cause problems when learning a language that does not have a V2 construction, as the subject and object can be put in various places in the sentence. This flexibility does not exist in English, which might lead to a different use of the clause-initial position. The use of the clause-initial position in English texts written by Dutch English as a Foreign Language users as compared to native speakers of English was researched. The question that will be answered is: do Dutch EFL users use a non-subject constituent in clause-initial posi! tion more frequently than native speakers of English? This will be done by analysing texts, written by Dutch EFL users and native speakers, which were taken from the LONGDALE project and the LOCNESS corpus. The Dutch EFL students were expected to use a non-subject constituent in clause-initial position more often than English native students, and the results have shown to be in line with the hypothesis.