On Friday, May 11th, 2018, Alexandra Kinne, supervised by Marcus Callies (Bremen) and Cristóbal Lozano (Granada), defended her PhD dissertation “Weight as a determinant of syntactic variation in advanced
learner varieties. A corpus study of weight effects in L1 and L2 academic writing” at the University of Bremen. Christiane Bongartz (Cologne) acted as third reviewer of the dissertation. Alexandra’s work was awarded the highest distinction “summa cum laude”. Congratulations!
learner varieties. A corpus study of weight effects in L1 and L2 academic writing” at the University of Bremen. Christiane Bongartz (Cologne) acted as third reviewer of the dissertation. Alexandra’s work was awarded the highest distinction “summa cum laude”. Congratulations!Her dissertation examined how syntactic variation is affected by probabilistic factors in English as an L2, as exemplified by the effect of weight on the highly weight-sensitive word order alternation with two types of multi-word units: English transitive verb-particle constructions (aka particle placement with phrasal verbs such as look up or sort out) and transitive idiomatic verb-prepositional phrase constructions (such as take into account or bear in mind).