Gaëtanelle Gilquin

Corpora and experimental methods: A state-of-the-art review

Abstract This paper offers a state-of-the-art review of the combination of corpora and experimental methods. Using a sample of recent studies, it shows (i) that psycholinguists regularly exploit the benefits of combining corpus and experimental data, whereas corpus linguists do so much more rarely, and (ii) that psycholinguists and corpus linguists use corpora in different ways in terms of the dichotomy of exploratory/descriptive vs. hypothesis-testing as well as the corpus-linguistic methods that are used. Possible reasons for this are suggested and arguments are presented for why (and how) corpus linguists should look more into the possibilities of complementing their corpus studies with experimental data.

To err is not all. What corpus and elicitation can reveal about the use of collocations by learners

Abstract This article studies advanced French-speaking learners’ knowledge of make-collocations. It suggests that, while an investigation of the errors found in a learner corpus may be enlightening, it should ideally be complemented by two other types of analyses, namely a comparison of the learner corpus data with native data, which highlights phenomena of overuse or underuse, and elicitation tests, which focus on competence rather than performance. Using such a threefold approach, this study shows that, while the learners under study do not make many errors, they tend to underuse make-collocations and limit themselves to those which have a direct equivalent in their mother tongues and are therefore safer. When forced to produce certain collocations or judge their acceptability, on the other hand, they reveal their collocational deficiencies and unreliable judgements.

Corpus, Cognition and Causative Constructions

English causative constructions with cause, get, have and make are often mistakenly presented as (quasi-)synonymous and more or less interchangeable. This book demonstrates the value of corpus linguistics in identifying the syntactic, semantic, lexical and stylistic features that are distinctive for each of these constructions. It also underlines the usefulness of providing corpus studies with a solid theoretical foundation by showing how corpus linguistics can be fruitfully combined with cognitive linguistics, which is used both as a starting point for the analysis (top-down approach) and as a framework within which to interpret the corpus results (bottom-up approach). From a methodological point of view, the study illustrates the complementarity of corpus and elicitation data, and offers tools and methods that could be used to investigate other syntactic structures. Finally, the book also has a pedagogical dimension in that it examines how the research findings can be applied to foreign language teaching.

Linking up Contrastive and Learner Corpus Research

The papers brought together in this volume explore, through corpus data, the link between contrastive and interlanguage analysis. Learner corpora are approached from a contrastive perspective, by comparing them with native corpora or corpus data produced by learners from other mother tongue backgrounds, or by combining them with contrastive data from multilingual (translation or comparable) corpora. The integration of these two frameworks, contrastive and learner corpus research, makes it possible to highlight crucial aspects of learner production, such as features of non-nativeness (errors, over- and underuse, unidiomatic expressions), including universal features of interlanguage, or more general issues like the question of transfer. The ten papers of this volume cover topics ranging from methodology to syntax (e.g. adverb placement, postverbal subjects), through lexis (collocations) and discourse (e.g. information packaging, thematic choice). The languages examined include English, Chinese, Dutch, French and Spanish. The book will be of interest to a wide array of readers, especially researchers in second language acquisition and contrastive linguistics, but also professionals working in foreign language teaching, such as language teachers, materials writers and language testers.

The use of phrasal verbs by French-speaking EFL learners. A constructional and collostructional corpus-based approach

Abstract This paper investigates the use of phrasal verbs by French-speaking foreign learners of English, using spoken and written learner corpus data and comparing them against similar data representing native English. It adopts a constructional approach, which distinguishes between three levels of analysis: the higher level of the phrasal verb ‘superconstruction’, the intermediate level of the structural patterns [V Prt], [V Prt OBJ] and [V OBJ Prt], and the lower level of lexically specified phrasal verbs. The approach is also collostructional in that it seeks to bring to light lexical associations at the constructional level. The results show that the difficulties that learners are known to have with phrasal verbs are mainly situated at the level of the superconstruction; at the lower levels of analysis (especially the intermediate one), on the other hand, learners seem to have largely internalised the main features of the constructions. More generally, the paper highlights the benefits of combining Construction Grammar and learner corpus research to gain insights into the L2 construction.

Elephants who marry mice are very unusual: The use of the relative pronoun 'who' with nonhuman animals

This paper explores the use of the relative pronoun (who) with nonhuman animals. The paper looks at what dictionaries, an encyclopedia, grammars, publication manuals, newspapers, and news agencies say and do relative to this issue. In addition to investigating the views and practices of these authoritative publications, the study also searched a 100-million-word collection (corpus) of spoken and written English. The study found that while some reference works reject or ignore the use of (who) with nonhuman animals, other works discuss the possibility, and (who) does occur in the corpus with nonhuman animals. Explanations for such usage include psychological closeness with particular nonhuman animals and/or features shared with humans. The paper suggests that the use of (who) with nonhuman animals might play a role in promoting human attitudes and behaviors beneficial to fellow animals. However, it cautions that the correlation between language use, on the one hand, and attitudes and behaviors, on the other hand, is not a perfect one.

Causative Get and Have So Close, So Different

The study presented here centers on the causative verbs get and have. Within the framework of frame semantics and on the basis of corpus data, it is shown that the two verbs have a number of features in common but also present important differences. In addition, this study is an illustration of how the cognitive theory of frame semantics can be combined with a corpusbased approach.

Error annotation systems

and says only that this part of the learner utterance is unidiomatic, confl ating an implicit target hypothesis with an error tag (the annotator is only able to know that this expression is unidiomatic if he or she knows a more idiomatic expression). Different target hypotheses are not equivalent; a target hypothesis directly infl uences the following analysis. The Falko corpus consistently has two target hypotheses – the fi rst one deals with clear grammatical errors and the second one also corrects stylistic problems. The need for such an approach becomes clear in (11). The learner utterance in (11) contains a spelling error . The two occurrences of dependance have to be replaced by dependence . From a more abstract perspective, the whole phrase Dependence on gambling sounds unidiomatic if we take into account that the learner wants to refer to a specifi c kind of addiction. Similarly, dependence on drugs appears to be a marked expression as opposed to drug addiction . An annotation that wants to take this into consideration has to separate the description into the annotation of the spelling error and the annotation of the stylistic error in order not to lose one of the pieces of information. Example (12) illustrates this. The examples in this section show how important the step of formulating a target hypothesis is – the subsequent error classifi cation critically depends on this fi rst step. In order to operationalise the fi rst step of the error annotation , one can give guidelines for the formulation of target hypotheses, in addition to the guidelines for assigning error tags, which also need to be evaluated with regard to consistency (see Section 2.6 ). The problem of unclear error identifi cation has been discussed since the beginning of EA. Milton and Chowdhury ( 1994 ) have already suggested that sometimes multiple analyses should be coded in a learner corpus. If (11) Dependance on gambling is something like dependance on drugs (...) (ICLE-CZ-PRAG-0013.3) (12) LU Dependance on gambling TH 1 Dependence on gambling TH 2 Gambling addiction (10) LU it sleeps inside everyone from the start of being TH 1 it sleeps inside everyone since birth TH 2 it sleeps inside everyone from the beginning TH 3 it sleeps inside everyone UNIDIOMATIC 9781107041196c07_p135-158.indd 145 6/11/2015 1:48:09 PM LÜDELING AND HIRSCHMANN 146 the target hypothesis is left implicit or there is only one error analysis , the user is given an error annotation without knowing against which form the utterance was evaluated. In early corpora (pre-multi-layer, pre-XML) it was technically impossible to show the error exponent because errors could only be marked on one token. In corpora that use an XML format it is possible to mark spans, and target hypotheses are sometimes given in the XML mark-up. Only in standoff architectures, however, is it possible to give several competing target hypotheses. Examples of learner corpora with consistent and well-documented (multiple) target hypotheses are the Falko corpus, the trilingual MERLIN corpus (Wisniewski et al. 2013 ) or the Czech as a Second Language corpus (Rosen et al. 2014 ).

Applied Construction Grammar

Current research within the framework of Construction Grammar has mainly adopted a theoretical or descriptive approach, neglecting the more applied perspective, and especially the question of how language acquisition and pedagogy can benefit from a CxG-based approach. The present volume explores various aspects of the field of “Applied Construction Grammar”, through a collection of studies that apply Construction Grammar (CxG) and CxG-inspired approaches to relevant issues in L2 acquisition and teaching. Relying on empirical data and covering a wide range of constructions and languages, the chapters show how the cross-fertilization of CxG and L2 acquisition/teaching can lead to new theoretical insights and improved pedagogical practices. Applied Construction Grammar can improve the description of learners’ use of constructions, provide theoretical insights into the processes underlying their acquisition (e.g. with reference to inheritance links or transfer from the L1), or lead to novel teaching practices and resources aimed to help learners make the generalizations that native speakers make naturally from the input they receive.

Contrastive collostructional analysis: Causative constructions in English and French

Abstract This paper offers a contrastive collostructional analysis of English and French periphrastic causative constructions with make/faire in academic writing. Using data from the British National Corpus (for English) and from Scientext (for French), it investigates the interaction between the constructions and their non-finite verb slot. The (simple and distinctive) collexemes strongly attracted to the make and/or faire causative constructions are grouped into semantic classes, which are compared and help identify the typical meaning(s) of each construction. It appears that the English construction particularly attracts non-volitional verbs describing mental processes and (stimulus subject) perception, while the French construction preferentially attracts verbs of (dis)appearance and verbs expressing a change of state or location. These results contribute to situating the two constructions differently on the conceptual map of causation.