Conditional clauses in novice academic English: A comparison of Norwegian learners and native speakers

Abstract

This study concerns the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of conditional clauses in novice academic English. The material comes from the VESPA corpus, representing Norwegian advanced learners of English, and the BAWE corpus, representing English L1
students in British universities. The learners are shown to overuse conditionals in general, but to mostly master their syntactic and semantic features. The overuse may be associated with the interpersonal functions of conditionals. The epistemic use in argument building is more apparent among the native speakers.