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Becoming a proficient academic writer: shifting lexical preferences in the use of the progressive

Recent corpus studies have shown that learners of English are aware of systematic associations between verbs and their preferred argument structures to an extent that is similar to that of a native speaker of English (e.g., Gries and Wulff, 2005). Given evidence for similarly systematic associations in native speaker data at the lexis–morphology interface (e.g., Romer, 2005a), the question arises whether, and to what extent, learners of English are also sensitive to lexical dependencies at the level of morphology, and how their verb-aspect associations compare with those of native speakers. In order to address this question, this study focusses on the potential associations between verbs and progressive aspect in German learners' academic writing. On the basis of the German component of the International Corpus of Learner English and the Cologne–Hanover Advanced Learner Corpus, learners' significantly preferred verb-aspect pairs are identified using an adaptation of collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsc...