Syntactic Interpretations of Reduced Adverbial Clauses in Cookbooks

Abstract

This study examined syntactic interpretations of reduced adverbial clauses in cookbooks as written in English. Related previous studies concentrating on syntactic interpretations of reduced adverbial clauses selected the materials of news articles, such as sports news articles and political news articles as written in English. This current study contributes to the field by selecting the material of cookbooks as written in English as everyone can read them regardless gender and ages. The data collection in this study was gathered from Thailand: The Cookbook (Gabrial, 2014) and Japan: The Cookbook (Hachisu, 2022) due to their best sellers and their popularity as international food. The data analysis follows Swan’s (2016) framework where syntactic interpretations of reduced adverbial clauses are classified into three categories including verbless adverbial phrases, related adverbial phrases and absolute adverbial phrases.  To ensure that the results of this study will be analyzed reliably and consistently, three linguists whose English is their mother tongue were instructed to validate the data analysis. The results of this current study show that the highest frequency of reduced adverbial clauses is absolute adverbial phrases at 54 percent followed by verbless adverbial phrases and related adverbial phrases. This phenomenon is explained by principle of least effort requirement and principle of informality. It is expected that the results of this study will be beneficial for learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) concerning the use of syntactic interpretations of reduced adverbial clauses in writing recipes correctly and appropriately.