L1 and L2 English Anaphoric Alternation Analysis with 2,607 Instances

2,607 annotated instances of the abstract anaphoric alternation between 'this' and 'this'+NP in argumentative writing. The dataset comprises 1,304 instances from Mandarin Chinese-L1 L2 learners and 1,303 instances from a native English baseline, each annotated for four discourse-internal factors. Jianwei Xu published the dataset on figshare in April 2026.

Use Cases

• Modeling probabilistic constraints on syntactic alternations based on annotated discourse factors
• Comparing L1 and L2 language systems based on the annotated instances from two distinct groups
• Analyzing the economy-clarity trade-off in anaphoric choice based on givenness, antecedent type, subjectness, and distance annotations
• Investigating constraint significance, ranking, and interactions in language use based on the tripartite multifactorial analysis framework

Strengths

• Dataset contains 2,607 total annotated instances, providing a substantial basis for analysis
• Includes a balanced comparison with 1,304 L2 instances and 1,303 L1 baseline instances
• Each instance is annotated for four specific discourse-internal factors: givenness, antecedent type, subjectness, and distance

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Data may reflect bias inherent to the specific academic study context

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Annotated instances extracted from argumentative writing for a linguistic study.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-17 17:35:31; freshness should be verified