Studies On The Developmental Use Of Attributes And Adverbials In L2 Writings By High School Students

With dependency grammar as the theoretical basis, this study investigated the developmental features of modifier dependencies represented by attributes and adverbials. The data of this study include 342 timed writings with different topics by junior and senior high school students across six grades (G7-G12) at 13 schools in a province.The major findings are:1) The overall MDD (Mean Dependency Distance) generally increases through six grades and a noticeable drop could be observed at the stage of G10; 2) MDD of attribute-related dependencies basically demonstrates an up-going tendency except for a drop at G10 after the senior high school entrance examination when students have insufficient language input; 3) Among all the attribute-related dependencies, acl:relcl (attributive clause) plays a crucial part in overall attribute-related MDD development; 4) The developmental tendency of head-initial structure distribution conforms to MDD development, that is, it generally goes up across six grades; 5) MDD of adverbial-related dependencies generally demonstrates an up-going tendency:insignificant decrease of MDD at G10 is mainly attributed to the decreasing MDD of adverbial clause modifiers; the stage of G12 experiences another drop due to more compact sentence structure; 6) The developmental tendency of head-initial structure distribution follows a descending path except for a slight increase at the stage of G12.As a measure of sentence complexity, MDDs of attributes and adverbials in L2 writings generally show an up-going tendency except for several drops, which means students tend to use more complex structures with more years of language learning. As a measure for language classification, the proportion of head-initial attributive structures generally increases across six grades, proving that students gradually tend to use more complicated structures; the proportion of head-initial adverbial structures decreases across six grades, indicating students at higher grade pay more attention to coherence of their writings.It is concluded that these findings will provide some implications for understanding syntactic development, especially the acquisition of syntactic structures; it will also provide pedagogical implications for teachers in terms of syntax instruction. Hopefully, the findings of this study will be inspiring in future relevant studies, resulting in more dependency grammar-based research in the domain of SLA.