Nadja Nesselhauf

Collocations in a learner corpus

Collocations are both pervasive in language and difficult for language learners, even at an advanced level. In this book, these difficulties are for the first time comprehensively investigated. On the basis of a learner corpus, idiosyncratic collocation use by learners is uncovered, the building material of learner collocations examined, and the factors that contribute to the difficulty of certain groups of collocations identified. An extensive discussion of the implications of the results for the foreign language classroom is also presented, and the contentious issue of the relation of corpus linguistic research and language teaching is thus extended to learner corpus analysis.

Collocations in CALL: An Investigation of Vocabulary-Building Software for EFL

In this paper, CALL software for English vocabulary-learning is tested as to its usefulness for learning collocations. Our analysis of seven commercially available programs – most of them for German-speaking learners – shows that, so far, collocations have been largely neglected in CALL. A number of suggestions are made for collocational exercises that are likely to be both useful for the learner and easy to implement in a CALL program.

The development of future time expressions in Late Modern English: redistribution of forms or change in discourse?

This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the development of the future time expressions will , ’ll , shall , be going to , progressive with future time reference, and be to in the course of the late modern period. The article focuses on possible reasons for the considerable changes that have taken place in the past few centuries. To what degree can the changes be described as certain forms having been (partially) replaced by others? To what degree have general or register-specific changes in discourse affected the use of future time expressions? These questions are investigated on the basis of the British part of ARCHER ( A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers ). The analysis reveals that it is a complex interaction of both types of processes that is responsible for the recent evolution of future time expressions. Redistribution processes turn out to be highly complex in themselves, going far beyond the frequently described replacement of shall by will and probably proceeding in chains. With respect to discourse change, one result is an unexpected overall decrease in the tendency of writers (and speakers) to refer to their own plans, intentions, etc. Partly responsible for this development is a discourse change in science writing, where the author has increasingly disappeared from the text, so that text structure is much less frequently expressed in terms of the authors intention. A further register-specific discourse change that the investigation brings to light is a development in diaries from an earlier restriction to reporting past events to the expression of more personal views, including hopes and fears for the future.

Diachronic analysis with the internet? Will and shall in ARCHER and in a corpus of e-texts from the web

This paper investigates the potential of a quick-and-dirty corpus compiled from the web for diachronic analysis. The development of the future time expressions will, shall, and ‘ll in 19th century British English is first studied on the basis of a “traditional” diachronic corpus, ARCHER, and then on the basis of a corpus of fiction texts created from electronic texts available on the internet. In addition to the overall changes in the relative occurrences of the three forms, the changes in three types of linguistic contexts (person, negation, and if-clause environments) are investigated. One of the main differences found in the results based on these two (types of) corpora is the development of ‘ll: While the results from ARCHER point to a decrease in this expression in the 19th century (both in fiction texts and overall), the results from the fiction corpus point to an increase. Closer investigation reveals considerable inter-textual variation in the use of this form. The analysis demonstrates that, although not reliable as the only source for diachronic analysis, a quick-and-dirty corpus from the web can yield insights that can supplement those gained by a traditional corpus.

The path from learner corpus analysis to language pedagogy: some neglected issues

The analysis of learner corpora is often expected to contribute to language pedagogy, but the question of how exactly results from learner corpus studies can be turned into suggestions for language teaching has received practically no attention so far. In this paper, the necessity of discussing this question is pointed out and some directions the discussion could take are outlined. While the typical result of a learner corpus study is the identification of a number of features that are particularly difficult for a certain learner group, it is argued here that suggestions for language teaching should not be based exclusively on the criterion of difficulty and that, moreover, the criterion of difficulty itself needs refining in order to be truly relevant. The discussion of these theoretical issues is based on results from a learner corpus study investigating the use of collocations by advanced learners.