Search

Learner corpus research has a strong tradition of collecting metadata. However, while we tend to collect rich descriptive information about learners on directly measurable variables such as age, year of study, and time spent abroad, we frequently do not know much about learner characteristics that cannot be measured directly (and that thus need to be measured through questionnaires and tests) such as language aptitude, working memory, and motivation, which have been identified as important variables in neighboring fields such as Second Language Acquisition. In this position piece, we (i) join the proponents of increased focus on learner characteristics in LCR in arguing in favor of collecting information about such variables and (ii) introduce an analytical framework that can be used to model these variables. Specifically, the primary focus of this paper is to discuss the concept of latent variables as it relates to LCR and show how their standard form can be used to model learner characteristics within the structural equation modeling analytical framework.

There are sets of grammatical stance markers that are morphologically and semantically related, but that differ with regard to their syntactic realization (e.g., importantly, it is important that and the importance of). Little attention has, however, been paid to how these pattern across registers. This study examines eleven such sets across five registers in apprentice and expert production to investigate which register(s) the apprentice writers’ use is closest to and what that can tell us about their adherence to academic norms. The results show that there is a cline from the a priori more formal registers to the less formal registers for the stance markers investigated. When the apprentice writers’ usage was mapped onto this cline, it became clear that their usage diverged slightly from that of the academic experts, thus indicating a lack of register awareness. Yet, very little evidence was found to support previous claims of the ‘spoken-like’ nature of learner writing.

This study investigates ( i) whether there has been a shift towards increased statistical focus in corpus linguistic research articles, and, if so, ( ii) whether this has had any repercussions for the attention paid to linguistic description. We investigate this through an analysis of the relative focus on statistical reporting versus linguistic description in the way the results are reported and discussed in research articles published in four major corpus linguistics journals in 2009 and 2019. The results display a marked change: in 2009, a clear majority of the articles exhibit a preference for linguistic description over statistical reporting; in 2019, the exact opposite is true. The number of different statistical techniques employed has also gone up. Whilst the increased statistical focus may reflect increased methodological sophistication, our results show that it has come at a cost: a diminished focus on linguistic description, evident, for example, through fewer text excerpts and linguistic examples, which appears to be symptomatic of increasing distance from the language that is the object of study. We discuss these shifts and suggest some ways of employing sophisticated statistical techniques without sacrificing a focus on language.

This corpus-based study tests the Principle of No Synonymy across levels of abstraction by examining the syntactic realizations of subject extraposition (e.g., it is important to, it seems that), and by investigating at which level(s) of formal description a difference in form also entails a difference in function. The results show that distinct pairs of form and function, i.e. constructions, can be found at different levels of abstraction, but that these constructions also subsume formal realization patterns that do not encode a difference in function. This suggests that the Principle of No Synonymy largely breaks down at low levels of formal description. The study also offers a constructional account of subject extraposition by identifying a number of subject extraposition constructions, thereby showing that this is a syntactic phenomenon that is best analyzed as a family of constructions.

The Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA first release) is the result of an international corpus compilation project that aims to address the lack of large-scale, open access, multi-L1, multi-discipline and multi-register learner corpora. This corpus report provides a detailed description of VESPA and illustrates possible uses of the corpus for register exploration of learner data. Specifically, it first offers an overview of the makeup of the corpus and the online interface that can be used to search and download the corpus. It then gives an illustrative example of a study where multi-dimensional analysis was used to investigate the relative importance of register vis-à-vis other factors in learner academic writing. In the concluding remarks, we identify priorities for future developments in the VESPA project, including the addition of more L1 components, more disciplines and more registers, as well as the compilation of a comparable corpus of native student writing.

Review of Ditte Kimps. Tag questions in conversation: A typology of their interactional and stance meanings. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2018, 250 pp

Core vocabulary items (e.g. thing, way) are often viewed as the enemy of effective academic writing, and style guides and textbooks often advise against using them. However, their bad reputation seems to stem from a single-word perspective that ignores the rich phraseological units that such items tend to figure in. In this study, we focus on the core vocabulary lemma thing to investigate the extent to which a phraseological approach can redeem its reputation. We look at learner essays from ten different first-language backgrounds from the International Corpus of Learner English and compare these to reference corpora from the endpoints of the informal-formal continuum: the Spoken BNC2014 and the Corpus of Academic Journal Articles. The results show that a phraseological approach indeed provides a more nuanced view of the core lemma thing : it is used in a wide variety of multi-word units, many of which common in academic writing. Although some signs of novice production are evident in the learners’ writing, their use is closest to that of the expert academic writers. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of phraseology in vocabulary lists used in teaching and assessment.

Paradoxically, doing corpus linguistics is both easier and harder than it has ever been before. On the one hand, it is easier because we have access to more existing corpora, more corpus analysis software tools, and more statistical methods than ever before. On the other hand, reliance on these existing corpora and corpus linguistic methods can potentially create layers of distance between the researcher and the language in a corpus, making it a challenge to do linguistics with a corpus. The goal of this Element is to explore ways for us to improve how we approach linguistic research questions with quantitative corpus data. We introduce and illustrate the major steps in the research process, including how to: select and evaluate corpora, establish linguistically-motivated research questions, observational units and variables, select linguistically interpretable variables, understand and evaluate existing corpus software tools, adopt minimally sufficient statistical methods, and qualitatively interpret quantitative findings.

The competing demands of teaching, research, and service seem to never end. Consequently, as academics, we often find ourselves feeling unable to realize our professional goals while also maintaini ...

In this volume, Berndt Spillner provides an extensive overview of the field of linguistic errors. The volume is divided into two parts. The first part, the introduction, is made up of eight very br...

The introductory it pattern, as in it is important to remember the differences , is a functionally diverse pattern of great importance to academic discourse. However, previous studies have found that using the pattern in an expert-like manner can prove challenging in particular for non-native-speaker students. The present study develops a functional classification in order to investigate what factors may affect the differences in use of the pattern across different groups of students. It maps out the functional distribution of the pattern across three parameters: academic discipline, native-speaker status (non-native-speaker vs. native-speaker students) and level of achievement (lower-graded vs. higher-graded NNS student texts). The study uses data from three corpora of student writing: ALEC, BAWE and MICUSP. The results show that there were differences across all three parameters, suggesting that these variables are all important to take into account in studies of this kind. For example, the non-native-speaker students exhibited an uneven command of the subtleties of the pattern, leading to problems with certain functional categories, such as attitude markers (e.g. it is surprising that ) and hedges (e.g. it seems that ), which indicates that this would be a fruitful area to focus on in second language instruction.

The ability to successfully position oneself in relation to one’s claims through the use of stance markers is of central importance for academic writers. This study, which uses data from one expert corpus (LOCRA) and three learner corpora (ALEC, VESPA and BATMAT), investigates the use of morphologically related stance markers that occur in different syntactic constructions (such as possibly, the possibility of and it is possible that). In doing so, it examines to what extent lexis, level of expertise in academic writing and L1 transfer influence the distribution of the different realizations of stance under investigation. The results show that all three variables are important predictors. In addition, differences pertaining to information structure are found to influence the distribution of two largely synonymous constructions (disjuncts and the introductory it pattern). The findings suggest that there are principled explanations for why one construction is used instead of another functionally similar construction.

Review of Maria Luisa Carrio-Pastor, ed.: New Challenges for Language Testing: Towards Mutual Recognition of Qualifications

The present study looks at adverb placement in expert writing and in first-language and second-language novice spoken and written production. The extent to which first-language (L1) transfer is still present in advanced learners’ written production is also investigated. The study uses data from one expert corpus (LOCRA), two native-speaker student corpora (BAWE and LOCNEC) and two learner corpora (VESPA and LINDSEI). The results highlight the importance of taking mode into consideration, as clear distributional differences were found between spoken and written production. In addition, while considerable differences could be noted across L1 background in the spoken data, factors such as presence/absence of auxiliary, verb type (e.g. intransitive, copular/linking) and lexis were found to be most important for predicting adverb placement in the written data. Only very limited evidence of L1 transfer was found in the learners’ writing, suggesting that advanced learners have largely mastered the distributional preferences of adverbs.

This chapter introduces the main functionalities of R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, and its integrated development environment RStudio. It starts with a quick introduction about the basics of R and RStudio (how to install R and RStudio, and get started). Next, it focuses on data handling (how to prepare, load, check, manage and save data with R). The second part of the chapter deals with descriptive statistics (measures of central tendency, measures of dispersion and coefficients of correlation) and visualization techniques used to explore linguistic data (in the form of bar plots, mosaic plots, histograms, ecdf plots and boxplots).

The present article aims to introduce structural equation modeling, in particular measured variable path models, and discuss their great potential for corpus linguists. Compared to other techniques commonly employed in the field such as multiple regression, path models are highly flexible and enable testing a priori hypotheses about causal relations between multiple independent and dependent variables. In addition to increased methodological versatility, this technique encourages big-picture, model-based reasoning, thus allowing corpus linguists to move away from the, at times, somewhat overly simplified mindset brought about by the more narrow null-hypothesis significance testing paradigm. The article also includes commentary on corpus linguistics and its trajectory, arguing in favor of increased cumulative knowledge building.

The introductory it pattern, as in it is interesting to note the changes made , is a versatile pattern of great importance to academic writers. However, very little attention has been paid to its syntactic and lexical variability. The present study investigates the degree of variability of the pattern with regard to its syntactic and lexical make-up in expert and apprentice learner writing, and whether the variability and/or frequency of particular realizations found in expert writing has an effect on the use of the pattern in learner writing. The study uses data from the Advanced Learner English Corpus (ALEC) and the Louvain Corpus of Research Articles (LOCRA). The results show that the pattern is relatively invariable overall, as certain high-frequency realizations account for the bulk of the tokens in both corpora. With some noteworthy exceptions, the learners use the pattern similarly to the experts, which suggests that the learners generally are proficient users of the pattern. However, the it V ADJ to-inf subpattern, possibly due to its particularly high token frequency in the expert data, was significantly overused by the learners, as was its most frequent realization it V POSSIBLE to-inf ; there thus seems to be a frequency effect in play.

This study investigates whether I’m sure seems to be on the same grammaticalisation trajectory as I think. It does so by tracking the frequency of these two constructions over time to explore (i) their distribution across clausal positions (syntagmatic variability) and (ii) the extent to which the complementiser that is omitted (paradigmatic variability). The study uses spoken data from the BNC and the newly compiled Spoken BNC2014. The results show that the two constructions exhibit remarkable similarity, not only in terms of their proportional distribution across clausal positions, but also in terms of their propensity for that-omission. For example, both constructions show adverb-like behaviour with regard to clausal positions. Furthermore, even though the time span covered is relatively short, a clear increase in that-omission was noted for I’m sure, mirroring the frequencies for I think very closely. It thus seems that I’m sure is on the same path as I think, despite differences in frequency entrenchment.

Subject extraposition (e.g. it is important to remember) is generally considered to be a formal construction that learners, whose writing is often said to be overly informal, have been found to struggle with. This study investigates to what extent register and text type can be used to explore learners’ reportedly “informal” use of this construction. Learner writing is compared to expert writing from several different registers and to native-speaker student writing. The results show that there are important differences across both registers and text types. Furthermore, while the learners’ use is most like that of the experts’ academic writing, certain similarities to the non-academic registers were also noted. The results additionally suggest that earlier claims about the informal status of learner writing seem mainly to have been influenced by the text types included in the corpora previously investigated.

The introductory it pattern, as in ‘It is important to note that information was added’, is a tool used by academic writers for a range of different rhetorical and information-structural purposes. It is thus an important pattern for students to learn. Since previous research on student writing has indicated that there seems to be a correlation between form and function of the pattern, the present study sets out to investigate this more systematically in non-native-speaker and nativespeaker student writing in two disciplines (linguistics and literature). In doing so, the study adds to and extends previous research looking into factors such as NS status and discipline. It uses data from three corpora: ALEC, BAWE and MICUSP. The results show that there is indeed a correlation between form and function, as the most common syntactic types of the pattern each display a preferred function and vice versa. While very few differences across NS status were found, there were certain discipline-specific disparities. The findings, which could be useful for teaching students about the use of the introductory it pattern, also have implications for the automatized functional tagging of parsed corpora.