A Developmental Study Of Prepositional Phrases In English L1 Students' Academic Writing

Following the research tradition on the phrasal-embedded discourse style of academic writing,most studies have investigated the use of phrasal features in student writing to explore writing development.Among them,however,only a few focused on prepositional phrases(PPs),with even fewer on their uses in English L1 students' writing,which is hypothesized to show a trend of development over school years(Biber & Gray,2011).This study aims to testify the hypotheses on the development of grammatical complexity in academic writing by examining the use of prepositional phrases in English L1 students' writing.More specifically,this study,on the one hand,aims to trace the possible developmental stages by examining the use of PPs in English L1 students' academic writing across four study levels;on the other hand,aims to figure out the process of constructing disciplinary knowledge by investigating the use of PPs in English L1 students' writing across four disciplines.Based on a corpus sampled from BAWE,this study explored the structural,functional and semantic complexity of PPs by using various corpus analysis tools,including tools for syntactic analysis(Stanford Parser 3.80),for syntactic features identification and extraction(Tregex 3.8.0),for concordancing(AntConc 3.2.2)and a wordlist tool(the NOMLEX_PLUS word list).By using these tools,we found that,1)English L1 students' use of PPs in terms of the PPs themselves are different among different study levels and disciplines.These differences include,firstly,the use of PPs did not present the trend of development across four study levels with the most uses in Level 2(L2)students' writing and the least uses in Level 3(L3)students' writing.This finding does not in line with the findings in previous studies,which found that the use of PPs have increased along with the study level.However,by taking the findings of the exploration of the syntactic functions of PPs into consideration,we found that even though students at L2 use the most PPs,most of them functioned as Adverbials;and this is not the same case for students at L3,whoes use of PPs tend to functioning as noun phrases post-modifiers,which is claimed as one of the prominent characteristics of modern academic writing.secondly,students from different disciplines used PPs differently,with students from Art and Humanities and Social Sciences using much more PPs than students from Life Sciences and Physic Sciences.This finding is consistent with the findings in previous studies,which claimed that students from Art and Humanities and Social Sciences are asked to use grammatical features that allow them to discuss the rather complicated historical events,social relationships and various opinions;2)English L1 students' use of PPs in terms of the internal structures are different across study levels and disciplines.The differences include: firstly,even though the use of the types of head prepositions and prepositional complements were relatively constant across levels,English L1 students used different amount of head prepositions and prepositional complements across levels.As for the head prepositions,the explorations of the most frequently used type of head preposition,of and other prepositions found that students at L1 and L2 relied more heavily on preposition of,while students at L3 and L4 tended to use more other types of prepositions.With regard to the use of prepositional complements across levels,the mostly used types are noun phrases and non-finite complement clauses(i.e.V-ing clauses).We found that students at L2 used the largest number of PPs with noun phrases as prepositional complements and the least number of PPs with V-ing clauses as prepositional phrases,and this is the opposite case for students at L3;however,the general trend for the use of these two types of prepositional complements is decreasing along with the levels and this is consistent with the general decreasing trend of the use of PPs across levels.Moreover,as for the use of prepositional complements embedding structures,we found that there is an increasing trend of using prepositional complements embedding across levels,which may indicate that students at higher levels showed tendency to use longer or more complicated prepositional complements structures to construct PPs in their writing.Secondly,as for the use of head prepositions and prepositional complements,it also presented differences across disciplines,with students from Art and Humanities and Social Sciences used more amount of prepositions and prepositional complements than students from Life Sciences and Physic Sciences;moreover,students from Art and Humanities and Social Sciences tended to use various types of head prepositions to work together with noun phrases or V-ing clauses,while students from Life Sciences and Physic Sciences showed greater interest to preposition by,working together with V-ing clauses,which may indicate that students from Life Sciences and Physic Sciences inclined to highlight the research methods or tools they adopted in their study.Considering the prepositional complements embeddings within PPs,we found that students from Art and Humanities and Social Sciences used more embedded structures than students from Life Sciences and Physic Sciences,which may suggest that students from Art and Humanities and Social Sciences tend to use more complicated prepositional complement structures to express themselves.3)English L1 students' use of PPs in terms of their syntactic functions showed differences across study levels and disciplines.Firstly,as mentioned above,the use of prepositional phrases functioning as noun phrases post-modifiers and Adverbials did not present a linear increasing trend across levels,with students at L2 using the largest number of PPs functioning as Adverbials and students at L3 using the largest number of PPs to function as noun phrases post-modifiers;moreover,considering the interactions between the internal structures and the syntactic functions of PPs,we found that students at lower levels relied heavily on PPs with ‘of +noun phrases' structure to function as noun phrase post-modifiers,while students at higher levels inclined to use PPs with head prepositions other than of to function as noun phrases post-modifiers;Secondly,the use of PPs functioning as noun phrases post-modifiers and Adverbials showed differences across disciplines: students from Art and Humanities used more PPs with ‘of + noun phrases' and ‘of + V-ing clauses' structures to function both as noun phrase post-modifiers and Adverbials;while for students from Life Sciences and Physic Sciences,they tended to use PPs that is made up of prepositions other than of and noun phrases to function as noun phrases post-modifiers.4)English L1 students' use of PPs to express meanings showed differences across levels and disciplines: firstly,students at higher levels used more deverbal nouns in their writing to express abstract meanings than students at lower levels;moreover,with regard to the frequently used deverbal nouns in each level,students at higher levels used many deverbal nouns that denote the meaning of processes and the post-modifier PPs were treated as the “Patient” of the deverbal nouns;while students at lower levels used many deverbal nouns that express more ordinary meaning.Secondly,students from different disciplines used deverbal nouns differently,with students from Art and Humanities and Social Sciences used more types and amounts of deverbal nouns than students from Life Sciences and Physic Sciences.Based on these findings,we have provided a rather comprehensive picture of the use of PPs in English L1 students' academic writing across different levels and disciplines,and this will eventually help the EAP instruction in EFL/ESL environment.