Using corpora in SLA research: investigating word order

http://www.uam.es/woslacUniversidad

Autónoma de Madrid

WOSLAC project:2 learner corporaWOSLAC project:2 learner corpora

CEDEL2CEDEL2 WriCLEWriCLE

MAIN PURPOSE To analyse properties constraining word order in L2 grammar:

• at lexicon-syntax interface[Unaccusativity Hypothesis]

• at syntax-discourse interface [Topic, Focus]

Amaya Mendikoetxea (Project Leader)Cristóbal Lozano (CEDEL2)Michael O’Donnell (UAM CorpusTool)Paul Rollinson (WriCLE)

CEDEL2 “Corpus Escrito del Español L2” (Cristóbal Lozano)• L1 English – L2 Spanish • TARGET: 1 million words (so far: 500,000 words)• Online data collection (webpage)• Learners from universities all over the world (USA, UK, Australia, Spain)• Data gathering:

•Learning background•Spanish Placement Test (Wisconsin)

http://www.uam.es/proyectosinv/woslac/collaborating.htm .

WriCLE “Written Corpus of Learner English” (Paul Rollinson)• L1 Spanish – L2 English • TARGET: 1 million words (so far: 600,000 words)• Essays written by 1st and 3rd year students of English at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid• Data gathering:

• Learner & Essay profile• Oxford Quick Placement test

SOFTWARE: UAM CorpusTooL 2.0 (by Michael O’Donnell)

• It can select and annotate a structure: text / sentence / phrase / word.• It can assign features to that structure: cleft, passive, preposing, extraposition …• Automatic detection of patterns.• XML format.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & FUNDING• Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, project no. HUM2005-01728FILO• Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid & Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, project no. 09-SHD-01

http://www.uam.es/woslac/cedel2.htm

FREE DOWNLOAD from: http://www.wagsoft.com/CorpusTool/

Team members: Amaya Mendokoetxea (project leader),´Gema Chocano, Rocío Jiménez, Cristóbal Lozano, Susana Murcia, Michael O’Donnell, Paul Rollinson, Iván Teomiro.

SOME PUBLICATIONS: Lozano, C. & Mendikoetxea, A. (in press). Postverbal subjects at the interfaces in Spanish and Italian learners of L2 English: a corpus analysis. In: Papp, S., Díez, B. and Gilquin, G. (eds). Linking up contrastive and corpus learner research. Rodopi.Lozano, C. (in press). Selective deficits at the syntax-discourse interface: Evidence from the CEDEL2 corpus. In: Leung, Snape & Sharwood-Smith (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Lozano, C. & Mendikoetxea, A. (in press). Verb-Subject order in L2 English: new evidence from the ICLE corpus. In: Actas del XXV Congreso Internacional de AESLA. Universidad de MurciaLozano, C. & Mendikoetxea, A. (2007). Learner corpora and the acquisition of word order: A study of the production of Verb-Subject structures in L2 English. In: M. Davies, P. Rayson, S, Hunston, P. Danielsson (eds) Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference 2007, University of Birmingham. O'Donnell, M. 2008. "The UAM CorpusTool: Software for corpus annotation and exploration". Proceedings of the XXVI Congreso de AESLA, Almeria, Spain, 3-5 April 2008.O'Donnell, M. 2008. " Demonstration of the UAM CorpusTool for text and image annotation". Proceedings of the ACL-08:HLT Demo Session (CompanionVolume), Columbus, Ohio, June 2008. Association for Computational Linguistics. pages 13–16.