Vaclav Brezina

Does Speaker Role Affect the Choice of Epistemic Adverbials in L2 Speech? Evidence from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus

This study investigates stance-taking strategies in a context of an examination of spoken English. The focus of the research is on the interaction between the candidates (advanced L2 speakers) and the examiners (L1 speakers of English). In particular, the study explores the use of epistemic adverbial markers such as ‘maybe’, ‘certainly’ and ‘surely’. These markers are used not only to express speakers’ position (certainty or uncertainty) towards a statement, but also to express speakers’ position towards other interlocutors (e.g. to manage interpersonal relationships or to downplay strong assertions). The study is based on the advanced subsection of the Trinity Lancaster Corpus of spoken L2 production which currently contains approximately 0.45M words based on four speaking tasks: one mostly monologic task and three highly interactive tasks. The study compares the expression of epistemic stance by both the candidates and examiners and explains the differences between speakers’ performance in terms of different speaker roles assumed by the candidates and examiners in three dialogic tasks. The study stresses the importance of looking at the contextual factors of speakers’ pragmatic choices and demonstrates that when studying L2 spoken production it is important to go beyond characterising the speakers as ‘native’ or ‘non-native’ speakers of a language. Whereas the fact of being a ‘native user’ or a ‘non-native user’ can indeed be part of the speaker role and speaker identity, other equally important factors arising from the context of the exchange may play a role in speakers’ stance-taking choices.

Collocation Graphs and Networks: Selected Applications

This chapter discusses the notion of collocation graphs and networks, which not only represent visualisation of the collocational relationship traditionally displayed in a tabular form but also constitute a novel analytical technique. This technique, although originally proposed by Philips in 1985, has only recently gained prominence with the introduction of the #LancsBox tool (Brezina et al., Int J Corpus Linguist 20:139–173, 2015), which can, among other things, build collocation graphs and networks on the fly. Simple collocation graphs and collocation networks show association and cross-association between words in language and discourse and can thus be used in a range of areas of linguistic and social research. This chapter demonstrates the use of the collocation network technique in (i) discourse analysis, (ii) language learning research and (iii) lexicography, providing three case studies that focus not only on the variety of applications but also on different methodological choices involved in using the technique.

Morphological complexity in written L2 texts

Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language acquisition (SLA). After critically discussing existing approaches to calculating MC in first- and second-language acquisition research, this article presents a new operationalization of the construct, the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI). The MCI is applied in two case studies based on argumentative written texts produced by native and non-native speakers of Italian and English. Study 1 shows that morphological complexity varies between native and non-native speakers of Italian, and that it is significantly lower in learners with lower proficiency levels. The MCI is strongly correlated to proficiency, measured with a C-test, and also shows significant correlations with other measures of linguistic complexity, such as lexical diversity and sentence length. Quite a different picture emerges from Study 2, on advanced English learners. Here, morphological complexity remains constant across natives and non-natives, and is not significantly correlated to other text complexity measures. These results point to the fact that morphological complexity in texts is a function of speakers’ proficiency and the specific language under investigation; for some linguistic systems with a relatively simple inflectional morphology, such as English, learners will soon reach a threshold level after which inflectional diversity remains constant.