A corpus based study on L2 English hypothetical conditionals

Granger (2009) considers the place of learner corpus (LC) studies at the crossroads of four language research areas: corpus linguistics, linguistic theory, second language acquisition and foreign language teaching (p. 13). Granger also stresses the significance of learner corpus in the field: `using main principles, tools and methods from corpus linguistics, it aims to provide improved descriptions of learner language used for a wide range of purposes in foreign/second language acquisition research and also to improve foreign language teaching? (2002, p. 4). So, researchers can utilize the learner corpus in their interest of research areas. In examining various variables that could affect English interlanguage, ?researchers commonly use International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), which contributes to language research areas with the abundance of hands-on material.? (Can, 2010, p. 16)A particular type of linguistics complexity in grammatical variation studies is `dependent clause? which consists of three main structural clauses; namely, relative clauses, adverbial clauses and complement clauses. These structural clauses have their sub-divisions. In this study, `adverbial clauses? is the main theme, which has three major meaning domains as conditional (if), cause (because), and other clauses (e.g., after, before, while, until, as, since, so that) (Biber, 2006, p. 77). In adverbial clauses, hypothetical conditional sentences composed by using conditional (if), has been selected as a topic of research examination in the observed argumentative written essays.The ultimate purpose of the study is to reveal any possible effects of interlanguage by the over and/ or underuse of hypothetical conditional clauses in argumentative essays of Turkish students written both in Turkish and English Languages by native speakers of English and EFL Turkish students, native speakers of Turkish in the light of four corpora: Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), Turkish University Corpus (TUC), and two other subcorpora of International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE); Turkish International Corpus of Learner English (TICLE) and Japanese International Corpus of Learner English (JPICLE). In this study, the quantitative results obtained from the four corpora have discussed any possible English interlanguage property on the use of particular modal verbs in hypothetical conditional structures examined in Japanese and Turkish EFL learners? written performances.Key Words: Learner Corpus, Hypothetical Conditional Clauses, Interlanguage, Corpus Linguistics, LOCNESS, ICLE, JPICLE, TICLE, TUC.