Collocations and local textual functions of quantifiers in learner English essays

Over decades, corpus linguistic research has yielded a number of theoretical insights into linguistic mechanism of the English language. One of these concepts is “local textual function”, which features a dialectical relationship between lexical items and texts. The concept has been applied to various text types but never to learner writing, even though the production of texts is an important communicative skill emphasized in English language teaching and learning. At the same time, learner corpus research has tended to pay particular attention to lexicogrammatical patterns without relating them to textual output produced by language learners. The present study therefore seeks to fill in these gaps through an application of the text-lexicogrammar theoretical construct to an analysis of a linguistic category that has hardly been dealt with in learner corpus research, i.e. quantifiers. The words “some”, “many” and “every” are among the top 25 function keywords in Thai undergraduates’ English argumentative writing, when compared with a corpus of their native speaker counterparts’. They were hence investigated in terms of their phraseological patterns and functional contributions to the discourse of Thai learner essays. Findings from the analysis shed light on the textlinguistic dimension of the quantifiers in native and non-native speaker learner usage and have pedagogical implications.