Stefanie Wulff

Corpus-linguistic applications

This volume provides an overview of four currently booming areas in the discipline of corpus linguistics. The first section is concerned with studies of the history and development of morphological and syntactic phenomena in English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. The second section contains case studies investigating the functions and contexts of use of different morphological and syntactic forms in English, Spanish, Russian, and Mandarin Chinese. The third section contains studies in the field of genre and register from settings as diverse as health, call center, academic, and legal discourse. The final section features papers refining existing, and exploring new, corpus-linguistic methods: dispersions, text mining, corpus similarity, as well as the development of extraction patterns and the evaluation of tagging methods.

The Naked Truth about the Naked This: Investigating Grammatical Prescriptivism in Technical Communication

The decision to follow the demonstrative this with a noun phrase is important to students’ writing development. Previous research has emphasized when students should not attend this rather than studying why students make the choice. Using a corpus-linguistic approach, we investigated 1,999 instances of (un)attended this in student technical and academic writing. High shares of unattended this were found in both text types as well as in original and revised drafts.

What learner corpus research can contribute to multilingualism research

Corpus linguists are increasingly interested in applying their methodological tool box to the various areas of multilingualism. This paper gives an overview of corpus resources and presents three case studies on L2 foreign language learning that employ quantitative methods. The goal is to demonstrate that corpus-linguistic approaches further our understanding of many hot topics in learner language research, including appropriate characterizations of the L1 input and/or target norm; the adequate modeling of the intrinsically complex and highly L1-specific nature of learner language; and the increasingly recognized role of individual variation in the acquisition process. The paper closes with a brief discussion of how these methods can and should be applied to other areas of multilingualism research.

Online statistics labs

Abstract Recent publications in the field of corpus linguistics (including several in this and the previous issue of CLLT) strongly indicate that the field is on its way from a view of corpora as mere repositories of authentic data from which examples can be culled ad libitum to a methodology that analyzes linguistic phenomena systematically and exhaustively as they manifest themselves in corpus data. Thereby, corpus linguistics is becoming an attractive complement to other empirical research methods in the language sciences, such as experimental designs.

Optional that in complementation by German and Spanish learners

The conditions under which native speakers (NS) decide to realize or drop the complementizer have been intensively studied (e.g., Jaeger 2010; Tagliamonte and Smith 2005; Thompson and Mulac 1991; Torres Cacoullos and Walker 2009), while few studies have investigated this phenomenon in non-native speakers (NNS) (e.g., Durham 2011; Wulff, Lester, and Martinez-Garcia 2014). In the present study, we therefore address the following research questions: – What factors govern that-variation in intermediate-level German and Spanish L2 learners of English? – How do these learners’ preferences compare to those of native speakers? More specifically, under what conditions, how much, and why do learners deviate from native speaker behavior?

Psycholinguistics and variation in language processing

Abstract This Special Collection includes a number of articles published together on the topic of Psycholinguistics and Variation and identified by the keyword “PsychLingVar” The collection reflects our view that variation in language processing is both important and ubiquitous, and that such variation presents challenges that psycholinguists have long ignored. In this article, we provide a brief overview of current psycholinguistic research on variation, including the articles featured in the collection. While quite diverse, this collection of articles is united by the common goal of investigating variation in language processing.

Workshop: Integrating data-driven learning into the technical writing classroom

Technical writing service courses have become a mainstay across institutions of higher education. However, the heterogeneous student population that these courses attract leads to generic instruction that often contradicts how students are expected to communicate within their respective fields. This workshop aims to provide participants with a basic introduction to data-driven learning as well as how to use corpora and text processing tools to facilitate more tailored technical writing instruction.