Syntactic sophistication in French EFL writing : A usage-based perspective to syntactic complexity

This dissertation focusses on syntactic complexity in upper-intermediate to advanced English as a second language (EFL) writing by native French learners. Syntactic complexity refers to the range of structures employed by language users. This construct has been a major gauge of learners’ writing proficiency in the domain of second language acquisition (SLA). In this dissertation I also investigate measures based on a new perspective: the usage-based theory. From a usage-based perspective, learners acquire the language by using it. Consequently, frequent items are learned first and are considered less sophisticated. Following this perspective, new measures have recently emerged: measures of syntactic sophistication. In this dissertation, I compare the ability of traditional measures of syntactic complexity and usage-based measures of syntactic sophistication to distinguish learner academic (i.e. discipline-specific) writing from upper-intermediate to advanced levels. The proficiency levels of learners are determined based on the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR) and range from B2 to C2 levels. The results show that traditional measures are not sufficient to distinguish the levels significantly. Additionally, only part of the syntactic sophistication measures show significant results, i.e. directional measures of association strength between a verb and its arguments which calculates the probability of both linguistic units to co-occur.Master [120] en linguistique, Université catholique de Louvain, 201