Vague language in English L2: a focus on Lithuanian learner English

Abstract

The present paper aims to account for the use of vague language (VL) in argumentative essays written by advanced Lithuanian learners of English. The study focuses on two main categories of VL: general extenders (GEs), e.g. and so on, etc. /etcetera, and or so, and vague quantifiers, e.g. some, many, a lot of, and a little. So far, research on Lithuanian learner English has mostly focused on linking words, writer positioning, hedging, and multi-word clusters, and VL has not been addressed yet. However, recent research on VL has shown that it constitutes an important part of pragmatic language competence and thus should be addressed in language teaching in a systematic way. The present research, first of all, aims to assess how extensively Lithuanian learners of English use VL in comparison to native speakers. Second, to explain why there are differences in the frequency of VL, quantitative corpus data is interpreted in view of the main functions that VL performs in non-native speakers’ essays. Finally, the frequency of VL is interpreted with regard to the formality of the items under investigation. This study is based on the Lithuanian component of the International Corpus of Learner English (LICLE; 244,746 words in total), which contains argumentative essays written by Lithuanian undergraduate students majoring in English Philology. Learner data is compared to native speaker language by resorting to the sub-corpus of texts for the discipline “English” in the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE-English; 458,780 words in total). The AntConc software was applied to process the data. [...]