Volume 11, Issue 1 - Special issue: Learner Corpus Research, Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, Editors: Sabine De Knop and Fanny Meunier

The introductory chapter of this special issue on ‘Learner Corpus Research, Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition’ addresses the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and potential threats of using both learner corpora and Cognitive Linguistics to research second language acquisition. We also discuss some terminological issues related to the notion of second language acquisition. Finally, we present the various chapters included in the volume and explain how each of them concretely articulates the connections between the three disciplines under analysis.

In this study, I contrast the uses of may and can by French and Chinese English learners in speech and writing. I annotated 4025 examples across four corpora according to more than 70 morpho-syntactic and semantic features and analyzed the features’ distribution using logistic regression modeling. The study reveals that when dissimilarities between the two learner varieties occur, they do so in speech rather than writing and they involve complex grammatical features such as the passive voice and heavy lexical verbs. Ultimately, those results suggest that non-native co-occurrence patterns found in conversations are more likely to be characteristic of learners’ individual interlanguage (IL) varieties compared to those found in writing. Overall, this study provides a first step towards multidimensional descriptions of IL registers. It also shows how four interacting factors contribute to the emergence of IL grammars: language processing demands, language production modes, grammatical contexts and individual IL varieties.

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.

This study combines experimental data and corpus data to describe how intermediate French-speaking learners of English perceive and (mis-)use the English present simple and present progressive. A first part of this study reports the results from an interpretation task conducted with first year, French-speaking, English language and literature university students (n = 75). With some exceptions, students were found to show greater acceptance of more prototypical prompts. They also exhibited higher certainty with these prompts. The second part of the study examines productive data from LONGDALE, a new longitudinal database of learner writing and speaking. Using annotated data for first year students, errors involving the present simple and progressive were extracted and classified in light of the interpretation task. Students were found to still make errors involving basic functions of the simple and progressive, as well as other errors that might be amenable to teaching. Finally, pedagogical implications are discussed.

The study of German posture verbs has attracted the interest of many linguists, e.g. Berthele (2004 and 2006), Fagan (1991), Kutscher-Schultze-Berndt (2007) and Serra-Borneto (1996). It is surprising that most studies disregard the posture verb sitzen ‘to sit’. The present paper aims at looking at this neglected area of description. A corpus study of sitzen allows us to get a differentiated picture of the different uses of that verb and to show that sitzen is not restricted to the concrete sitting position but is also used to express more abstract senses, e.g. Er sitzt in der Falle , lit. ‘He sits in the trap’ (= ‘He has problems’), or Das Kleid sitzt nicht , lit.‘The skirt does not sit’ (= ‘The skirt does not fit’). Foreign language learners have difficulties with the more abstract or metaphorical uses of verbs (compare Littlemore 2011), this also pertains to the abstract uses of sitzen . Interestingly enough, most teaching manuals for German do not describe the semantic uses of sitzen either. The study aims at making up for these deficits. With examples from the German corpora from the Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (DWDS), it first describes the different uses of the verb sitzen . It then offers a brief critical overview of teaching manuals for German. Based on essays from learner corpora, e.g. Falko, and cloze tests by French students it further presents the difficulties encountered by foreign learners of German with the more abstract or metaphorical uses of sitzen . In the framework of Cognitive Linguistics the study also proposes some ‘conceptual tools’ to facilitate the learning of the more abstract uses of the verb sitzen. These tools are semantic networks, visuals, and conceptual metaphors. Spatial distinctions such as those between container and contact are extended to more abstract areas of experience, especially in the context of situations describing abstract states. Here one of the main issues for the learner is to find out whether the abstract goal is conceptualized as a container, a contact or still another basic spatial relation. The efficiency of these conceptual tools is tested with a cloze test conducted with French-speaking students.

This paper investigates whether individual speakers forming a homogeneous group differ in their choice and pronunciation of words when engaged in casual conversation, and if so, how they differ. More specifically, it examines whether the Balanced Winnow classifier is able to distinguish between the twenty speakers of the Ernestus Corpus of Spontaneous Dutch, who all have the same social background. To examine differences in choice and pronunciation of words, instead of characteristics of the speech signal itself, classification was based on lexical and pronunciation features extracted from hand-made orthographic and automatically generated broad phonetic transcriptions. The lexical features consisted of words and two-word combinations. The pronunciation features represented pronunciation variations at the word and phone level that are typical for casual speech. The best classifier achieved a performance of 79.9% and was based on the lexical features and on the pronunciation features representing single phones and triphones. The speakers must thus differ from each other in these features. Inspection of the relevant features indicated that, among other things, the words relevant for classification generally do not contain much semantic content, and that speakers differ not only from each other in the use of these words but also in their pronunciation.

There is much interest in using large corpora to explore predictors of the probability of higher level linguistic structures, but suitable corpora are not available for all languages and their varieties. We explore a task that uses discourse contexts from an existing corpus as prompts for sentence completion to investigate the usefulness of the method for generating data as a proxy for unavailable corpus data. Mini databases of dative and genitive structures were obtained with the method using American and Australian participants. It is shown that the databases are indeed a good proxy for corpus data.