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Three conditions for Verb-Subject order in non-native English:

A corpus-based study

TALC7 Université Paris 7 – Denis Diderot3rd July 2006

Amaya Mendikoetxea amaya.mendikoetxea@uam.esCristóbal Lozano cristobal.lozano@uam.es

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

http://www.uam.es/woslac

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THE STUDY

Postverbal subjectsL1 Spa – L2 EngICLE corpusInterfaces

Lexicon-syntax Syntax-discourse

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THE “WOSLAC” PROJECT“Word Order in Second Language Acquisition Corpora”

MAIN PURPOSE:

To determine the lexicon-syntax and syntax-discourse properties which constrain word order in the interlanguage of L2 learner corpora L2 English (with L1 Spanish) L2 Spanish (with L1 English).

To examine the validity of: the Unaccusative Hypothesis at the lexicon-syntax

interface and the role of discourse functions such as topic and focus at the

syntax-discourse interface in L2 Spanish and English.

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Word order in native English

Very restricted: canonical word order SV. Four girls sang Four girls arrived

Lexicon-syntax interface (Levin & Rappaport-Hovav, etc): Unaccusative Hypothesis (Burzio 1986, etc)

*There sang four girls at the opera. There arrived four girls at the station.

Syntax-discourse interface (Biber et al, Birner, etc): Postverbal material tends to be focus (new info)

We have complimentary soft drinks and coffee. Also complimentary is red and white wine.

Syntax-Phonological Form (PF) interface (Arnold et al, etc) Heavy material is sentence-final (Principle of End-Weight, Quirk):

That money is important is obvious. It is obvious that money is important.

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Word order in native Spanish

Lexicon-syntax interface:

Syntax-discourse interface:

UNERGATIVES: SVA: Qué pasó?

B: Un hombre gritó [SV]

UNACCUSATIVES: SVA: Qué pasó?

B: Llegó un hombre [VS]

UNERGATIVESA: Quién gritó?

B: Gritó un hombre [VS]

UNACCUSATIVESA: Quién llegó?

B: Llegó un hombre [VS]

Theoretical evidence: Zubizarreta 1998, Casielles-Suárez 2004, Domínguez 2004 Empirical evidence: Hertel 2000, 2003, Lozano 2003, 2006

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Main purpose

To characterise the interlanguage of advanced learners (L1 Spa – L2 Eng)

by examining their production of both grammatical and ungrammatical VS structures: …and here emerges the problem. *In the name of religion it had occurred many important

events.

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Hypotheses

VS order in L1 Spa – L2 Eng…

GENERAL HYPOTHESIS: Conditions licensing VS in L2 Eng are the same as those in

Native Eng, DESPITE differences in grammaticalisation.

H1: Lexicon-syntax interface: Postverbal subjects with unaccs (never with unergs)

H2: Syntax-PF interface: Postverbal subjects: heavy (NOT light)

H3: Syntax-Discourse interface: Postverbal subjects: focus (NOT topic)

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Previous L2 findings Production of postverbal subjects in L2 English (Rutherford 1989,

Oshita 2004): L1 Spanish – L2 English:

…it arrived the day of his departure… And then at last comes the great day. In every country exist criminals …after a few minutes arrive the girlfriend with his family too.

Only with unaccusative verbs (never with unergatives). Unaccusatives: arrive, happen, exist, come, appear, live… Explanation: syntax-lexicon interface (Unaccusative Hypothesis)

Previous studies focused on ERRORS, thus emphasising the differences between native and non-native structures.Our study emphasises the similarities between native and non-native structures licesing conditions are the same.

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Method

Learner corpus: L1 Spa – L2 Eng ICLE Spanish subcorpus (Granger et al. 2002) UAM corpus [2nd edition of ICLE]

Problem: proficiency level??

WordSmith v. 4.0 (Scott 2004)

Excel, SPSS v. 12.0

Concordance queries can be performed automatically with WordSmith, BUT there is a lot of manual work (filtering out unusable data, coding data in Excel, analysing data in SPSS, etc).

Corpus Number of essays Number of words ICLE Spanish 251 200,376 UAM 85 63,836 TOTAL 336 264,212

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From Levin (1993) and Levin & Rappaport-Hovav (1995):

The data

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WordSmith: query searches:

For every lemma (e.g., APPEAR, ARISE), we searched for:

All possible native forms: • appear, appears, appearing, appeared• arise, arises, arising, arose, arisen

All posible overregularised and overgeneralised learner forms:

• arised, arosed,arisened, arosened (“So arised the Sain Inquisition”)

All possible forms with probable L1 transfer of spelling:• apear, apears, apearing, apeared

All other possible misspelled forms:

• appeard, apeard

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Wordsmith Concordances

3300 concordances approx: 820 usable concordances

(1/4) . Filtering criteria manually.

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Filtering criteria

MAIN FILTERING CRITERIA: The verb must be intransitive

(unergative or unaccusative). The verb must be finite, active voice. The subject can appear either

postverbally (VS) or preverbally (SV). The subject must be an NP. The sentence can be either grammatical

or ungrammatical in native English. OTHER FILTERING CRITERIA (TOTAL=28)

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Data coding/analysis: EXCEL

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Data analysis: preliminary descriptive stats - EXCEL

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Data analysis – inferential stats: SPSS

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Types of VS structures produced:grammatical & ungrammatical

Locative inversion: In the main plot appear the main characters: Volpone and Mosca.

There-insertion: There exist positive means of earning money.

AdvP-insertion: … and here emerges the problem.

* it-insertion: *In the name of religion it had occurred many important events…

* XP-insertion: *In 1760 occurs the restoration of Charles II in England.

* Ø-insertion: …*because exist the science technology and the industrialisation.

GRAMM.

UNGRAM.

Grammatical 36.2%

Ungrammatical 63.8%

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H1: Results: VS and unaccusativityTable 1: Proportion of postverbal subjects produced

Verb type # postverbal Subjects (VS)

# usable concordances

Rate

Unergative 0 181 0/181 (0%) Unaccusative 58 820 58/820 (7.1%)

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H2: Result: VS and weight

HEAVY

Against this society drama emerged an opposition headed by Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw.

…so came the decline of the theatre.

Then come the necessity to earn more.

LIGHT

So arised the Saint Inquisition…

…and from there began a fire.

Still today … exists the bloody fights.

Syntactic weight has to be measured manually according to some theoretical criteria

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H2: Result: SV and weight

HEAVY

…the cases of men mistreated do not appear in the media…

…a disintegration of culture, tradition and society would begin…

…the utopian societies created by the early socialists appeared.

LIGHT

…but they may appear everywhere.

…since the day eventually came…

…these people should exist, …

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H3: Result: VS and discourse

FOCUS

…there also exists a wide variety of optional channels which have to be paid.

So arised the Saint Inquisition.

In 1880 it begun the experiments whose result was the appearance of the television some years later.

TOPIC

…our modern world, dominated by science and technology and industrialisation …because exist the science technology and the industrialisation.

Discourse status (topic/focus) has to be measured manually by establishing theoretical criteria and then by checking the context (or even the essay) manually

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H3: Result: SV and discourse

TOPIC

I use the Internet … I find windows … if they press on any of these windows … these windows cannot appear because a child could enter easily…

…the world of drugs: mafias … problems with mafias finished … dangerous people making money … no reason why these people should exist.

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Conclusion

Lexicon-syntax Vunacc NPsubjSyntax-discourse FOCUSSyntax-PF HEAVY

NPsubj VunaccSyntax-discourse TOPICSyntax-PF LIGHT

V S

S V

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THANK YOU!

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SUMMARY The main purpose of this study is to determine the lexicon-syntax, syntax-

discourse and syntax-phonology properties which constrain Verb-Subject (VS) word order in the interlanguage of L2 learners of English (with L1 Spanish).

Previous studies have found only one condition on postverbal subjects in L2 English: the subject must appear with unaccusatives.

We show that there are three conditions determining advanced learners´ production of VS (=postverbal subjects), which are the same as those in native English.

In particular, we hypothesised postverbal subjects to appear: H1: with unaccusative verbs. H2: when the subject is heavy. H3: when the subject is focus.

These hypotheses were tested with data from a learner corpus (L1 Spa – L2 Eng).

Results confirm the hypotheses.

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Examples of production

Mostly S-V: 93% The real problem appears when they have to look for their first job. …these people should exist.

But many V-S (58 in total): 7% There exist positive means of earning money. So arised the Saint Inquisition. In the main plot appear the main characters: Volpone and Mosca.

*…it has appeared some cases of women that have killed their husbands. *…and from this moment begins the avarice. *…and appeared a lot more theatres.

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H1: Result: VS and specific unaccusative verbs