THE ENGLISH -ING PARTICIPIAL ADJUNCTS IN FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE WRITTEN DISCOURSE

Abstract

The study reported on in this article shows that the -ing participial adjuncts are used differently by native speakers of English depending on the genre they occur in. A comparison of data from written re-narrations of a film with the data from argumentative essays shows that these constructions are more frequent in narrative texts. The -ing participial adjuncts are typically used to express temporal succession (e.g. Anteriority) in narrative texts, whereas Means is the most frequent function of these constructions in argumentative essays. The native speaker data is then compared to that of Norwegian learners of English. The non-native-like patterns in the L2 data are attributed to L1 transfer and lack of knowledge about the genre-specific uses of the -ing clauses.