L2 Learner vs. Native Speaker Anaphoric Alternation in Argumentative Writing

A dataset of 2,607 annotated instances of abstract anaphoric alternation between 'this' and 'this+NP' forms. Jianwei Xu published this data on figshare in April 2026. It includes 1,304 instances from Mandarin Chinese-L1 learners and 1,303 instances from a native English baseline.

Use Cases

• Modeling the probabilistic constraints of anaphoric choice based on annotated discourse factors.
• Comparing L1 and L2 language systems based on annotated instances of 'this' and 'this+NP' usage.
• Training classifiers to predict anaphoric form based on factors like givenness, antecedent type, subjectness, and distance.
• Investigating the economy-clarity trade-off in discourse accessibility theory using annotated text data.

Strengths

• Dataset is explicitly annotated for four discourse-internal factors: givenness, antecedent type, subjectness, and distance.
• Provides a directly comparable L1 baseline with 1,303 instances and an L2 dataset with 1,304 instances.
• License is clearly stated as CC-BY-4.0, permitting reuse with attribution.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect bias inherent to the specific argumentative writing samples collected.

Provenance

Source

figshare, author Jianwei Xu.

Collection Method

Annotated instances extracted from argumentative writing, as described in the study.

Time Range

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Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-17 17:35:32; freshness should be verified.

Geography

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