The grammatical complexity of English noun phrases in Brazilian learner's academic writing: a corpus-based study

• Ano de defesa: 2019
• Autor(a) principal: Jessica Maria da Silva Queiroz
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; UFMG
• Palavras-chave em Português: sintagma nominal em inglês; complexidade gramatical; corpus de aprendiz; escrita acadêmica; Redação acadêmica; Língua inglesa Gramática; Língua inglesa Sintagma nominal; Linguística de corpus
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/LETR-BAPNWQ

There is an increasing number of research which is interested in investigating the grammatical complexity of academic writing in English. Some examine first language (L1) English writers texts (e.g. GRAY, 2015; BIBER; GRAY, 2016; STAPLES et al., 2016) while others analyze texts written by second language (L2) English learners (e.g. PARKINSON;MUSGRAVE, 2014; NITSCH, 2017; ANSARIFAR et al., 2018). These studies investigate either or both pre- and post- noun modification arguing about how such devices may help in the elaboration or compression of information (GRAY, 2015). Noun premodification, inparticular, has shown to serve the function of adding new information to a noun head in a way that makes the phrase more economical and faster to read (BIBER; GRAY, 2010, 2016). This thesis, then, is a corpus-based descriptive study which explores the grammatical complexity of the English noun phrase (NP) in two subcorpora (general topic essays: 46 texts and 18678 words specific topic essays: 68 texts and 32509 words) of the Corpus of English for Academic Purposes (CorIFA), a corpus of Brazilian university students writings. The studyexamines the NPs found in students argumentative essays written in an upper intermediate English for Academic Purpose course and categorizes them according to their constituency into simple and complex NPs. To do so, we automatically parsed the texts and extracted theword groups parsed as NPs. We manually categorized them into simple and complex NPs, identifying their constituents and adding them to different subcategories, such as simple NP with a determiner and head noun or complex NP with prepositional phrases (PPs) aspostmodifiers. The investigation reveals that Brazilian writers use more complex NPs than simple ones and, particularly, NPs with premodifying adjectives and NPs with postmodifying PPs. All in all, our corpus-based research shows that upper intermediate Brazilian university students are capable of producing structurally complex and compressed NPs, but we argue for more research on the grammatical complexity of NPs with a larger learner corpus and across learners various disciplines as well as across registers.