The Nominal Group in the Academic Writing of Italian Learners of English.

English writing in academic contexts presents degrees of complexity in terms of noun modification; although Nominal Group complexity reaches its highest level in published texts, this feature is found in all instances of English academic writing, both expert and non-expert, both L1 and L2, with different degrees of realization. The present study uses Parkinson and Musgrave’s (2014) analysis of the development of Nominal Group complexity in the academic writing of graduate learners of English to consider the same phenomenon in the academic writing of undergraduate Italian learners, enrolled in the three-year course ‘Modern Languages and Cultures’ at the University of Pavia. The groups under analysis are two: one made up of first-year students, whose expected proficiency in English is at B1/B2 CEFR level; the other made up of third-year students, whose expected proficiency in English is at C1 CEFR level. The Nominal Groups of each dataset are identified manually, to select the pre- and post- modifiers that contribute to nominal complexity; then, first- and third-year frequencies of each modifier are counted, and their difference is tested for significance. Third, a qualitative acquisitional analysis is applied to the data to build an index of Italian learners’ development of Nominal Group complexity; this step also includes a type-token analysis applied to some categories of modifiers, to make some observations about their internal distribution. Findings show that first-year learners tend to rely heavily on possessive adjectives, numeratives, and attributive adjectives, which are hypothesised as being acquired early. In the third year, despite learners’ reliance on possessive adjectives and numeratives diminishes in favour of more complex modifiers, some nominal features continue to pose processing problems: post-modifying clauses, with the exception of relative ones, and pre-modifying nouns. In particular, avoidance of these latter modifiers is probably due to L1 transfer, as the category of pre-modifying nouns does not find a correspondence in Italian.