International Journal of Learner Corpus Research - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2016

This study investigates 2,909 phrasal verbs [PVs] in (in)transitive constructions across native English and French- and German-English interlanguages (ILs). Recent work by Gilquin (2014) shows that, as verb-particle combinations, PVs associate more or less strongly with particular syntactic constructions. Further, those association patterns vary across native and learner Englishes. Building on Gilquin (2014), the present study digs deeper into PV constructions by assessing degrees of mutual attraction between verbs and particles as well as between PVs and their semantic uses. Degrees of association are measured using a co-varying collexeme analysis approach (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2005). Generally, it emerges that within given syntactic constructions (e.g. verb-particle-object constructions), different verbs and particles (i.e. bring and up in the case of build up or bring and about for bring about) combine in different degrees, suggesting that, as cognitive routines, those combinations are not equally entrenched. In addition, French and German English learners seem to operate at different levels of semantic complexity when using PVs in their L2. Ultimately, the study bears important pedagogical implications, namely the need (i) to focus on phrasal verbs’ aspectual uses to help learners develop a more confident use of PVs in completive, inceptive and continuative semantic contexts and (ii) to develop resources that help learners improve their uses of PVs in verb-object-particle constructions.

Findings from corpus-based and psycholinguistic research have highlighted the importance of acquiring productive knowledge of English phraseology for L2 learners. Many studies exploring this facet of language learning have investigated the use of predominantly fixed multi-word sequences by advanced learners in academic settings and compared their use against that of native-speaking writers. More recent studies have attempted to explore the differences between learners’ use of multi-word sequences across proficiency levels. The current study aims to add to this growing body of literature. It examines the use of phrase-frames by L1 German learners of English as a Foreign Language at five different proficiency levels represented in the EF-Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCAMDAT). The most frequent phrase-frames in each level are analyzed according to both quantitative and qualitative characteristics. The results revealed that, at higher proficiency levels, p-frames in learner texts are more variable, less predictable, and more functionally complex.

This paper adopts the Integrated Contrastive Model (Granger 1996) to an examination of the use of articles in the L2 English written production of L1 speakers of three article-less languages (Mandarin Chinese, Korean and Thai) across four L2 proficiency levels. Data is sourced from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE; Ishikawa 2011, 2013), comprising 575 written essays totalling 125,588 words across two writing prompts. Accuracy of zero, indefinite and definite articles is measured using Pica’s (1983) Target Language Use across Bickerton’s (1981) semantic/pragmatic article contexts (generic, specific definite, specific indefinite and non-specific indefinite). The results show two different orders of article accuracy depending on L1 background, as well as effects of writing prompt on the accuracy of certain article forms, and evidence of pseudo-longitudinal development for particular article usages as L2 proficiency increases, although not in all cases. Massive overproduction of indefinite/definite articles in generic contexts is problematic for all three L2 groups regardless of L1 background and L2 proficiency. However, Mandarin L2 English users appear to enjoy a significant advantage in L2 article accuracy over Korean or Thai L2 English users in almost all contexts of use and L2 proficiency levels, providing further potential evidence that the often reported grammaticalisation of definiteness/specificity markers in L1 Mandarin is aiding Mandarin L2 English users’ acquisition of the English article system.

This article presents the Kansas Developmental Learner corpus (KANDEL), a corpus of L2 German writing samples produced by several cohorts of North American university students over four semesters of instructed language study. This corpus expands the number of freely and publicly available learner corpora while adding to the depth of these corpora with a unique set of features. It does so by focusing on an L2 other than English, German, targeting beginning to intermediate L2 proficiency levels, and including dense developmental data and annotations for multiple linguistic variables, learner errors, and over twenty learner and task variables. Furthermore, this article reports the procedure and results of an inter-annotator agreement study as well as an in-depth analysis of annotator disagreement. In this way, it contributes to best practices of annotating learner corpora by making the annotation process transparent and demonstrating its reliability.