On the use of English reciprocal pronouns: An analysis of native and non-native student writing

The overall frequency of occurrence of English reciprocal pronouns, "each other" and "one another" may differ in non-native (L2) English in accordance with functional and structural strategies that EFL learners (learners of English) choose to employ in their L2 written/spoken productions. The present study adopts a frequency-driven approach and aims to investigate the general use of English reciprocal pronouns in native and non-native student writing, using five corpora: Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) and Turkish University Corpus (TUC) as the reference corpora of native English and Turkish languages and three other subcorpora of International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE); Turkish International Corpus of Learner English (TICLE), Japanese International Corpus of Learner English (JPCLE) and Spanish International Corpus of Learner English (SPICLE). Reciprocal pronouns have been retrieved from each corpus and investigated both quantitatively and qualitatively. A comparison of the use of reciprocal pronouns in L1 and L2 English writing has revealed overuse of "each other" in non-native English writing. Also, the use of reciprocal pronouns in L1-Turkish and L2-English writings of Turkish EFL learners has been examined. Following that, reciprocal pronouns have been analyzed in different groups of L2 English writings represented in ICLE, and issues related to interlanguages have been discussed. By adopting a second phase for the overall frequency analysis, lexical verbs used with reciprocal pronouns in both native and learner corpora have been extracted and categorized into semantic verb classes to explore the extent to which the frequencies of these classes differ in two groups.