Linking up contrastive and learner corpus research (Language & Computers)

Introduction Gaëtanelle Gilquin Université catholique de Louvain Szilvia Papp University of Portsmouth María Belén Díez-Bedmar Universidad de Jaén Most of the papers collected in this volume were presented at the workshop “Linking up contrastive and learner corpus research”, held in September 2005 in conjunction with the 4th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference that took place in Santiago de Compostela (Spain). What these papers have in common is that they all use learner corpora (i.e. large computerised collections of authentic data produced by learners of a foreign/second language) and that they do so from a contrastive perspective. “Contrastive”, here, means several things. It can refer to “contrastive interlanguage analysis” (see Granger 1996), which involves either the comparison of learner language with native language (as exemplified by Ädel’s study) or the comparison of several learner languages (as in Lozano & Mendikoetxea’s chapter). While the former type of comparison makes it possible to highlight features of non-nativeness in the learners’ production, such as misuse, overuse or underuse, the latter may point to problems which are shared by learners from different mother tongue backgrounds and hence are likely to be developmental (age-related, proficiency-related, etc). Another sense in which the approach in this volume may be described as “contrastive” is that several studies combine learner corpus analysis with contrastive analysis, comparing the target language and the learner’s mother tongue (see e.g. Demol & Hadermann’s paper). This dual approach, exemplified by the “integrated contrastive model” (Granger 1996, Gilquin 2000/2001), sheds light on the place of the mother tongue in the acquisition of the target language and foregrounds the notion of language transfer. The volume is divided into four parts, which correspond to four fields of investigation. The first part deals with methodological issues. After setting the scene for the combination of contrastive and learner corpus research, Gaëtanelle Gilquin proposes a model for the study of transfer-related phenomena, namely the Detection-Explanation-Evaluation (DEE) transfer model. This model, which relies on two existing frameworks for transfer research (Granger 1996 and Jarvis 2000), uses corpus data and combines contrastive analysis and interlanguage analysis. By drawing a number of comparisons between the mother language, the target language and the interlanguage, the model aims to detect cases of transfer, explain them and evaluate their pedagogical relevance. The DEE transfer model is illustrated by means of a case study of the use of even if by French-speaking

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learners, which shows how and why this expression displays traces of transfer and what consequences, if any, it should have on the foreign language teaching curriculum. Some limitations of the model are also discussed, with a view to further improving it and thus gaining an even better understanding of transfer. In the second paper, Annelie Ädel tackles the issue of corpus comparability and demonstrates that differences in foreign language production attributed to the learner’s mother tongue may in fact result from discrepancies in task setting (i.e. how much time is available) and/or intertextuality (i.e. whether access is given to secondary sources). Focusing on the presence of involvement features in the written production of Swedish learners of English, Ädel compares corpus data differing along the two parameters of task setting and intertextuality, and shows that the degree of involvement in learner writing is reduced when learners are involved in untimed tasks and when they are given secondary sources as input. In particular, the first factor turns out to affect the presence of first person pronouns, whilst the second factor is shown to have an influence on features such as disjuncts, questions and exclamations. The paper ends with some recommendations for testing practices in language teaching. In the second part of the volume, which focuses on learner lexis, John Cross and Szilvia Papp study verb + noun combinations as used by Chinese learners of English. By comparing their corpus data with similar data for Greek learners (Giovi 2006) and German learners (Nesselhauf 2003), they discover that Chinese learners use more non-native combinations than German and Greek learners. They also argue that Chinese learners are less creative in their production of verb + noun combinations than the other two groups of learners, who use such combinations in more experimental and innovative ways. Cross and Papp offer several explanations for this difference. Besides the influence of the mother tongue and the lack of exposure to the target language, they suggest that environment-related factors might be at work, including general beliefs widely held in the Peoples’ Republic of China and, more importantly, teaching and learning practices such as the memorisation and (inappropriate) recall of chunks of language. The next four papers investigate learner syntax. Cristóbal Lozano and Amaya Mendikoetxea examine the properties that govern the occurrence of postverbal subjects in English texts produced by Spanish and Italian advanced learners, and argue that postverbal subjects can only be accounted for by considering three interfaces, namely the lexicon-syntax interface, the syntaxphonology interface and the syntax-discourse interface. For each of these interfaces, they propose a hypothesis, which they then test on the basis of learner corpus data. The results of the analysis confirm the three hypotheses, namely that Spanish and Italian learners of English produce postverbal subjects with unaccusative verbs, not unergative verbs; that they tend to produce heavy subjects in postverbal position and light ones in preverbal position; and that they consistently produce focus subjects in postverbal position and topic subjects in preverbal position. No significant differences were found to exist between the two groups of learners regarding the conditions under which postverbal subjects

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occur. John Osborne’s paper is devoted to adverb placement, and more particularly Verb-Adverb-Object order, in the written production of learners of English from a variety of L1 backgrounds. The author shows that non-native-like adverb placement is still likely to occur at a post-intermediate stage, although more so among learners whose mother tongue has obligatory verb-raising (Romance languages), which may suggest a transfer of syntactic patterns. However, the fact that speakers of V2 Germanic languages, which also permit VAdv-O order, produce very few such sequences and that speakers of non-raising Slavic languages produce some of them proves that transfer is not the only explanation and that other factors must be at work too. These, according to Osborne, include semantic and phraseological factors, as evidenced by learners’ tendency to produce V-Adv-O sequences with “lighter” NPs and “weaker” VAdv collocations than native speakers would do. The paper closes with some desiderata for enriching the potential for contrastive studies based on learner corpora. María Belén Díez-Bedmar and Szilvia Papp are interested in the use of the English article system by two groups of learners, one having no article system in their mother tongue, viz. Chinese-speaking learners, and the other having an article system slightly different from the English one, viz. Spanish-speaking learners. Using Bickerton’s (1981) semantic wheel and Huebner’s (1983) subsequent taxonomy, as well as the theory of definiteness within pragmatics, the authors combine a contrastive analysis, which highlights the differences between the article use in English, Spanish and Chinese, with a contrastive interlanguage analysis, in which they test the hypotheses put forward on the basis of the contrastive analysis. The results of the contrastive interlanguage analysis show, among others, that, as predicted by the contrastive analysis, Chinese learners exhibit more non-native features in their overall use of the English article system than Spanish learners. In her paper, Christelle Cosme focuses on the use of adverbial and adnominal present/past participle clauses. Using comparable and translation corpus data, she examines whether the underuse of participle clauses by French- and Dutch-speaking learners of English observed by Granger (1997) may be explained by cross-linguistic influence, considering the common claim that English makes greater use of participle constructions than French and Dutch. Her data suggest that transfer may be put forward as a plausible explanation for Dutch-speaking learners. In the case of French-speaking learners, on the other hand, transfer seems to be at work only with present participle clauses. Cosme’s paper ends with a caveat that other factors may contribute to the underuse of participle clauses by French- and Dutch-speaking learners and should therefore also be investigated. The last part of the volume includes three papers, which all deal with learner discourse. Marcus Callies considers the phenomenon of raising constructions, adopting a functional-typological approach to second language acquisition. After reviewing the literature on the topic and highlighting the high degree of typological markedness of English raising constructions, he examines the frequency of occurrence and contextual use of raising constructions in the written production of advanced German and Polish learners of English. It

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emerges from this analysis that raising constructions, and in particular toughmovement (or object-to-subject raising) constructions, are problematic for both groups of learners, being as a rule underrepresented and misused in terms of information structuring and thematic progression. Callies concludes that the use of raising constructions by learners is the result of a complex interplay of factors including avoidance, transfer of training and unawareness of raised structures’ discourse functions. Mike Hannay and Elena Martínez Caro’s paper investigates the theme zone in the written production of Dutch and Spanish learners of English. Dutch and Spanish differ from English with regard to the structure of the theme area, and they also differ from each other. Yet, the authors show that the two groups of learners construct the beginning of their sentences in essentially the same way, using the various thematic patterns in comparable proportions (including an overuse of more complex structures). The differences that do exist point to a higher degree of grammatical competence among the Dutch learners, as well as a more elaborate use of the thematic options available in English. The Spanish learners, by contrast, produce a number of ill-formed structures, some of them possibly resulting from transfer, and they tend to exhibit a more limited range of functionalities. In the final chapter, Annemie Demol and Pascale Hadermann study discourse organisation in written narratives (film retellings) produced by French and Dutch native speakers, French-speaking learners of Dutch and Dutch-speaking learners of French. Alongside a contrastive analysis (French vs. Dutch), they are thus able to perform a contrastive interlanguage analysis, comparing the learner varieties with the native varieties (to detect possible traces of transfer), as well as the two interlanguages (to identify any common strategies). Their hypotheses concern the degrees of packaging, dependency and integration of the narratives. One important difference emerging from the analysis is the higher frequency of present participles in secondary predication in French as compared to Dutch, which may explain the tendency of Dutch learners of French to underuse this type of structure. The comparison of French L2 and Dutch L2 reveals no clear organisational pattern typical of interlanguage, although they both display slightly less complex discourse organisation than the native varieties in terms of average number of words per sentence and proportion of simple sentences. Although they deal with different topics, the ten papers brought together in this volume all underline the relevance of linking up contrastive analysis with learner corpus research. This is indeed the case if the goals and methods of contrastive linguistics are applied to learner corpora, as numerous studies in the past have already made clear and as confirmed by this book. But this is also true if contrastive data (ideally in the form of parallel and/or comparable corpora) are actually integrated into the analysis of learner corpora, a trend which has been relatively discreet until now but whose potential has been illustrated by several of the papers in this volume. Judging by the present collection and the workshop from which it originated, the combination of contrastive and learner corpus research is likely to stimulate more research studies in the near future and provide new insights into second language acquisition. Such insights could benefit

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professionals working in the field, such as language teachers, materials writers or language testers. In fact, it is our hope that some of the findings described in this volume may also lead to practical applications in the classroom, so that the ground-breaking research reported here can be linked up with teaching. References Bickerton, D. (1981), Roots of Language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma Press. Gilquin, G. (2000/2001), ‘The Integrated Contrastive Model. Spicing up your data’, Languages in Contrast, 3(1): 95-123. Giovi, C. (2006), The use of verb-noun collocation by Greek advanced learners of English using corpora analysis and some implications for teaching. Unpublished MA dissertation, University of Portsmouth. Granger, S. (1996), ‘From CA to CIA and back: an integrated approach to computerized bilingual and learner corpora’, in: K. Aijmer, B. Altenberg and M. Johansson (eds) Languages in Contrast. Papers from a Symposium on Text-based Cross-linguistic Studies. Lund 4-5 March 1994. Lund: Lund University Press. 37-51. Granger, S. (1997), ‘On identifying the syntactic and discourse features of participle clauses in academic English: native and non-native writers compared’, in: J. Aarts, I. de Mönnink and H. Wekker (eds) Studies in English Language and Teaching. In Honour of Flor Aarts. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi. 185-198. Huebner, T. (1983), A Longitudinal Analysis of the Acquisition of English. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma. Jarvis, S. (2000), ‘Methodological rigor in the study of transfer: identifying L1 influence in the interlanguage lexicon’, Language Learning, 50(2): 245309. Nesselhauf, N. (2003), ‘The use of collocations by advanced learners of English and some implications for teaching’, Applied Linguistics, 24(2): 223-242.

Combining contrastive and interlanguage analysis to apprehend transfer: detection, explanation, evaluation Gaëtanelle Gilquin Centre for English Corpus Linguistics F.N.R.S. – Université catholique de Louvain Abstract This paper shows how contrastive analysis and interlanguage analysis can be combined into a model which aims to detect phenomena of transfer, explain them and evaluate them in terms of pedagogical relevance. The model, referred to as the Detection-ExplanationEvaluation (DEE) transfer model, relies on Granger’s (1996) Integrated Contrastive Model and Jarvis’s (2000) unified framework for transfer research, and uses corpus data as a basis for a range of comparisons between L1 (mother tongue), L2 (target language) and IL (interlanguage). As an illustration, the use of even if by French-speaking learners is investigated, and the possible influence of L1 is examined in the light of the different comparisons involved in the model. Finally, some limitations of the DEE transfer model are discussed, all of which point to possible developments that could be implemented in the future.

1.

Introduction

The importance of transfer in second language acquisition can now be regarded as an established fact. As observed by Kohn (1986: 21) two decades ago already, “there is no doubt that, despite its sometimes irritatingly elusive character, transfer is one of the major factors shaping the learner’s interlanguage competence and performance”. Two main sources of data have been used over the years to investigate the influence of the mother tongue (L1) on the interlanguage (IL), namely contrastive analysis (CA) data and learner data. Selinker (1989: 287) notes that “CA is the best place to begin language transfer studies since structural congruence (or at the least, partial structural similarity) is most probably necessary, though not sufficient, for most types of language transfer to occur”. Indeed, Schachter’s (1974) analysis, which investigated the influence of L1 on the use of English restrictive relative clauses by learners from several mother tongue backgrounds, was demonstrated to be flawed, for lack of reliable CA data (Zhao 1989, Kamimoto et al. 1992). Without samples of learner production to rely on, however, studies of transfer, as faultless as they may be from a contrastive point of view, could offer nothing but useless predictions. Both contrastive analysis and interlanguage analysis are therefore necessary for a sound and systematic assessment of the role of transfer in second language acquisition.1

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In this paper, two models of transfer which combine a CA and an IL approach, Granger (1996) and Jarvis (2000), are compared in an attempt to develop a refined method to apprehend transfer. Three varieties of language will be considered, viz. L1, L2 (target language) and IL, and will lead to a number of comparisons which aim to detect transfer (when is it at work?), explain it (what are its origins?) and evaluate it from a pedagogical perspective (is it pedagogically relevant?). Reflecting this threefold purpose, the model will be referred to as the Detection-Explanation-Evaluation (DEE) transfer model. Because the interest here is in phenomena of transfer as they manifest themselves in naturally-occurring language, use will be made of corpora, whose value for linguistic descriptions has been underlined by numerous studies over the last few years. The paper is organised as follows. First, the phenomenon of transfer is briefly described and recontextualised, with special emphasis on its links with contrastive analysis and interlanguage analysis. Granger’s (1996) Integrated Contrastive Model and Jarvis’s (2000) unified framework for the study of L1 influence are then presented and compared. On the basis of this comparison, a new model of transfer is proposed, the DEE transfer model, which serves the threefold purpose of detecting, explaining and evaluating cases of transfer. The model is illustrated by means of a case study of the use of even if by Frenchspeaking learners, after which some of its limitations are outlined. The article ends with some concluding remarks. 2.

The transfer mystery

After a period in the 1950s and 60s when transfer was seen as all-pervasive and a period in the 1970s when its existence was denied, we have now reached a time when it is “generally accepted that transfer does occur, but is a far more complex phenomenon than hitherto believed” (Benson 2002: 68). Its exact nature, the circumstances in which it occurs or the processes it relies on in the learner’s mind are still, to a large extent, a mystery to linguists. As Dechert & Raupach (1989: ix) put it in their introduction, “[i]n spite of three decades of intensive research […] there is still no generally accepted agreement of what transfer in language actually is”. Lado (1957: 2) refers to the transfer of “the forms and meanings and the distribution of forms and meanings of [individuals’] native language and culture to the foreign language and culture”. Odlin’s (1989: 27) definition is broader, as it covers the influence of “any other language that has been previously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired”. In other words, transfer is not limited to the influence of L1 on L2, but could involve the influence of, say, L2 on L3 or L3 on L5. Neither of these definitions, however, explicitly raises the possibility of a simultaneous influence of several languages. Nor do they allow for the fact that a language, most typically the native language, may be influenced by subsequently acquired languages. In order to take such phenomena into account, transfer will be defined here in very general terms, as the influence, within an individual’s

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linguistic system, of one or more languages over another.2 Moreover, we will consider both cases of negative transfer, when the influence leads to erroneous usage,3 and positive transfer, when it leads to correct usage. The notion of transfer is closely related to contrastive analysis. In fact, as pointed out by Ringbom (1995: 581), the original idea behind contrastive analysis was to bring to light the problems that learners from a specific mother tongue background might experience in learning a given foreign language. However, the study of learner language (so-called “interlanguage”, see Selinker 1972), initially investigated within the frame of error analysis, revealed that problems could occur in cases not predicted by contrastive analysis and, conversely, that not all areas predicted as difficult by contrastive analysis were actually problematic for learners (Ringbom 1995). Thus, while both contrastive analysis and interlanguage analysis appeared necessary to make discoveries about transfer, it also turned out that the link between the two was far from obvious and required further research. The model of transfer presented here, the DEE transfer model, relies on two models combining contrastive and interlanguage analysis, namely Granger (1996) and Jarvis (2000), and aims to provide a systematic method for detecting transfer, explaining it and evaluating its pedagogical relevance. It involves three varieties of language (L1, L2 and IL) and six types of comparison,4 as summarised in Table 1, which also shows the abbreviations that will be used throughout the article. Of these six comparisons, the first three are instances of contrastive analysis, whereas the last three involve so-called contrastive interlanguage analysis.5 Each of them serves a particular (primary) purpose, namely detection for NL1/IL and ILa/ILb…ILz (see Section 6.1), explanation for OL1/OL2 and SL1/2/TL2/1 (see Section 6.2) and evaluation for NL2/IL and ILa/ILa (see Section 6.3). Table 1. Types of comparison and their abbreviations Abbreviation

Explanation

OL1/OL2

Comparison of original L1 and original L2 Comparison of source L1 and translated L2 or vice versa

SL1/2/TL2/1 NL1/IL NL2/IL ILa/ILa ILa/ILb…ILz

Comparison of native L1 and IL Comparison of native L2 and IL Comparison of interlanguage by learners from the same L1 Comparison of interlanguage by learners from different L1s

Example for French learner of English Original French vs. original English Source French vs. translated English or source English vs. translated French Native French vs. learner English Native English vs. learner English French learner English vs. French learner English French learner English vs. Spanish learner English vs. German learner English, etc

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Although the model is mainly illustrated through cases of transfer from L1 French to L2 English, and most of the examples concern lexical (and some syntactic) phenomena, it is possible to apply the DEE transfer model to other languages, other types of transfer – e.g. from L2 to L3 (Hammarberg 2001: 23) or from L2 to L1 (Pavlenko & Jarvis 2002) – and other phenomena (phonological, pragmatic, etc).6 And while all the illustrations come from written corpus data, the model could also serve to study transfer in speech, provided the necessary material is available. 3.

Granger’s (1996) Integrated Contrastive Model

In Granger’s (1996) Integrated Contrastive Model (ICM), two components are combined in an attempt to shed light on the phenomenon of transfer. The contrastive analysis (CA) component compares (i) original data from one language with original data from another language and (ii) source language and its translation in another language. The contrastive interlanguage analysis (CIA) component, similarly, consists of two types of comparison: (i) native language and a non-native variety of this language and (ii) different non-native varieties of one and the same language. The peculiarity of the model is that it exclusively relies on authentic data coming from computerised corpora. This has not always been the case in contrastive and interlanguage studies. The first comparisons of two or more languages were often intuition-based and the traditional error analyses of learner language usually relied on very small collections of texts.7 Recently, however, with the computer revolution, large amounts of machine-readable authentic data have become available. Parallel corpora (that is, corpora of original texts and their translations into one or several languages) and comparable corpora (that is, corpora of original texts in two or more languages which are similar in terms of domain, genre, etc) have made it possible to reassess a number of contrastive claims. Tisthoud (1992), for instance, shows on the basis of bilingual corpus data that the morphological flexibility of English as compared to French has been largely overestimated, with a number of French derivations being translated by means of a paraphrase in English (e.g. clochettes = little bells, improductivité = lack of productivity). Large and balanced corpora of interlanguage have also been compiled over the last few years. One of the first corpora of this type was the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE, see Granger et al. 2002), the latest version of which includes essays written by advanced learners of English from 16 different mother tongue backgrounds (Granger et al. forthcoming). Not only have such corpora allowed for the contextualisation of errors, but they have also enabled researchers to investigate what learners get right, what they overuse, i.e. use significantly more than native speakers, and what they underuse, i.e. use significantly less than native speakers. Corpora, therefore, have contributed to the

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development of both CA and CIA, thus making the model resulting from their integration a powerful tool, as will be shown presently. As appears from Figure 1, which represents the ICM, the notion of transfer occupies a central position, linking CA and CIA predictively and diagnostically. The predictive hypothesis (also called “CA a priori” or “strong CA hypothesis”) starts from the comparison of two languages (CA), either as original languages (OL vs. OL) or as source language and translated language (SL vs. TL), and on this basis makes predictions about the learner’s interlanguage. The assumption is that in the case of discrepancies between the learner’s mother tongue and the target language, the learner is likely to transfer the L1 pattern to his/her interlanguage, hence producing an erroneous L2 pattern (negative transfer). In the case of similarities between L1 and L2, on the other hand, the learner is expected to produce a correct pattern in L2 (positive transfer). By examining learner production data (CIA) and looking for traces of L1, one can test the accuracy of the predictions and thus establish the (potential) presence, or otherwise, of transfer. The diagram in Figure 1, by using a broken line to connect the CA and the CIA boxes, emphasises the hypothetical nature of the CA-based predictions: L1/L2 mismatches do not always lead to errors8 in interlanguage and, conversely, L1/L2 identity does not necessarily imply error-free use by learners (Gilquin 2000/2001: 101). The diagnostic hypothesis (also called “CA a posteriori” or “weak CA hypothesis”) follows the opposite path, starting from CIA and moving on to CA. By comparing the learner data with a reference native corpus (NL vs. IL) and with data produced by learners from other mother tongue backgrounds (IL vs. IL), one may notice L1-specific errors and look to contrastive analysis for an explanation. The diverging arrows in the diagram indicate that the explanation for an error will not always be found in the relation between the learner’s mother tongue and the target language. The errors observed may be due to other factors than L1 influence, e.g. intralingual factors, developmental factors, teachinginduced factors or communication strategies in interlanguage (see James 1980: 146). As pointed out by Granger (1996: 46), the ICM “involves constant to-ing and fro-ing between CA and CIA”. This can be illustrated by means of the analysis of the use of the passive by French-speaking learners of English. A quantitative study of the passive in native English and French-speaking learners’ English [CIA: NL vs. IL] brings out a significant underuse of the passive by the learners (Granger 1997). In order to test the role of L1 in this underuse, one may compare the frequency of the passive in native French and native English. A comparable corpus of newspaper articles [CA: OL vs. OL] reveals that the passive is about twice as frequent in English as in French (Fivet 1995, Granger 1998), which seems to suggest that the French learners’ underuse is transferrelated. Before drawing any such conclusion, however, it is safe to consider other varieties of learner English. From this examination [CIA: IL vs. IL], it turns out that the underuse of the passive is not limited to French-speaking learners, but also concerns learners from other L1 backgrounds (Granger 1997 highlights this tendency for Swedish- and Finnish-speaking learners as well), which appears to

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challenge the transfer-related explanation. One last verification is necessary, however, namely checking whether the other native languages do not exhibit a lower frequency of the passive than in English, as French does. Using an English/French and an English/Swedish parallel corpus [CA: SL vs. TL], Granger (1998) shows that the proportion of English passives that are translated by means of a passive is higher in Swedish than in French. The frequency of the passive in Swedish is close to that of the passive in English, so that Swedish learners’ underuse of the passive cannot be attributed to L1 influence. The underuse of the passive exhibited by French-speaking learners of English therefore seems to be a universal feature of interlanguage, which may be related to learners’ preference for the unmarked rather than marked option (Ellis 1994), or for a personal rather than impersonal style (see e.g. Petch-Tyson 1998). The influence of L1 French, however, cannot be excluded, and it is probable that transfer reinforces the effect of other factors.

Figure 1. Integrated Contrastive Model (Gilquin 2000/2001: 100, based on Granger 1996: 47)

Combining contrastive and interlanguage analysis 4.

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Jarvis’s (2000) unified framework for transfer research

In his (2000) article, Jarvis, noting the amount of confusion that reigns in the field of transfer research, offers a possible solution in the form of a unified framework consisting of three components, viz. a theory-neutral definition of transfer, a list of the types of evidence to be considered and a set of outside variables to be controlled. Jarvis’s proposed definition will not be discussed here (although it is important to stress that the types of evidence he advocates are derived from this definition), but the other two components will be examined, with particular emphasis on the evidence that should be produced to establish the existence of transfer-related phenomena with some confidence. Jarvis recognises that the essence of transfer “lies beyond the reach of the researcher” (ibid. 253-254), but he proposes a list of three effects which are subject to direct investigation and which should be considered before one is justified in positing the existence (or at least likelihood) of L1 influence. These three effects are: (i) (ii) (iii)

intra-L1-group homogeneity in learners’ IL performance; inter-L1-group heterogeneity in learners’ IL performance; intra-L1-group congruity between learners’ L1 and IL performance.

The first effect of L1 influence, the intra-L1-group homogeneity in learners’ IL performance, refers to the fact that learners who share the same mother tongue should exhibit a similar behaviour when using the target language. In other words, a particular feature should not be the idiosyncrasy of one or two individuals, but should characterise the group as a whole. The second effect, the inter-L1-group heterogeneity in learners’ IL performance, means that learners coming from different mother tongue backgrounds should perform differently in the target language. The behaviour of Italian learners of English, for example, should be specific to this learner population, and distinct from the behaviour displayed by, say, Finnish or Chinese learners of English. The third effect, the intra-L1-group congruity between learners’ L1 and IL performance, points to a parallelism between the learner’s mother tongue and his/her interlanguage. If the interlanguage presents a particular feature, there should be a corresponding feature in L1. While each of these effects has the potential to reveal the existence of L1 influence, Jarvis demonstrates that none of them is necessary nor sufficient in itself, as transfer may take place despite the absence of one of the effects and, conversely, an effect may be present but not transfer-related. To give but one example, several L1s may share a particular feature (especially if they belong to the same language family) and therefore produce the same effect on IL. In such a case, inter-L1-group homogeneity would not exclude the possibility of transfer. This leads Jarvis to argue that at least two effects out of the three he mentions should be identified before concluding that transfer is at play.

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In addition, Jarvis claims that any rigorous investigation of transfer should control for a number of outside variables, which may either promote or inhibit L1 influence. On the basis of the literature, he draws the following list of variables (Jarvis 2000: 260-261): a) b) c) d) e) f) g) h) i)

age; personality, motivation and language aptitude; social, educational and cultural background; language background (all previous L1s and L2s); type and amount of target language exposure; target language proficiency; language distance between the L1 and target language; task type and area of language use; prototypicality and markedness of the linguistic feature.

Jarvis illustrates his methodological framework by means of a study of the referential lexical choices made in English by Finnish-speaking and Swedishspeaking Finns. Using three different elicitation tasks (film retell, lexical listing and selection of lexical items), he investigates how a number of objects and actions are referred to by the participants, a carefully selected subject pool consisting of several learner groups at various levels of age, L2 exposure and L2 proficiency, and their L1-control group counterparts. All the variables listed by Jarvis (see above) were controlled for, except the second one (personality, motivation and language aptitude). The analysis of the results shows that, generally speaking, the learners’ lexical choices exhibit the three effects identified by Jarvis as typical of L1 influence – although their presence may at times be quite subtle. First, it turns out that, despite differences in age and L2 exposure, learners with the same mother tongue background tend to make similar lexical choices. Second, while the comparison of the lexical choices made by learners with distinct mother tongues does not reveal any significant differences, learners from different L1 backgrounds and matched according to age and L2 exposure still exhibit higher levels of heterogeneity than learners from the same L1 background and with differences in age and L2 exposure. Finally, although the comparison of learners’ interlanguage and mother tongue provides only partial support for the third effect, the other two types of comparison (first and second effects) show evidence of L1-IL similarities. Jarvis also demonstrates that, while some outside variables appear to have an influence on the results (e.g. age, L2 exposure, task type), none of them produces as consistent effects as the L1 variable. His study therefore underlines the importance of the mother tongue background in the interlanguage lexicon of Finnish- and Swedish-speaking learners of English. More generally, it also demonstrates the usefulness of a rigorous methodological framework to investigate the role of transfer in interlanguage studies. While Jarvis uses elicitation data to illustrate his model, one could envisage using authentic corpus data instead, in view of the advantages of corpora

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outlined in Section 3. Paquot (2006) adopts a corpus-based approach to Jarvis’s framework, testing the role of L1 influence on French-speaking learners’ overuse of the expression on the contrary. Her study relies on learner data from several ICLE components representing different mother tongue backgrounds, as well as comparable native data produced by French- and English-speaking students (CODIF and LOCNESS, see later). She tests the first and second effects (intra-L1group homogeneity and inter-L1-group heterogeneity in learners’ IL performance) by means of a simple analysis of variance (ANOVA), which indicates that the difference in frequency between the ICLE components is more significant than the difference between the distinct essays within each component. Computing pairwise t-tests with Bonferroni adjustment, she is then able to show that it is the French data which are mainly responsible for the statistically significant difference between the ICLE components. In other words, it turns out from the statistical analysis that the variability between the essays written by learners with different mother tongues is significant (inter-L1-group heterogeneity) and is greater than the variability within the essays written by the French-speaking learners (intra-L1-group homogeneity). In order to investigate the third effect, the intra-L1-group congruity between learners’ L1 and IL performance, Paquot compares the relative frequency of on the contrary in French-speaking learners’ interlanguage with its relative frequency in a corpus of native English on the one hand, and with the relative frequency of the French equivalent, au contraire, in a corpus of native French on the other hand. It appears that the results of the learner corpus are more similar to the results of the native French corpus than to those of the native English corpus, which suggests that French-speaking learners tend to transfer the frequency of au contraire when producing on the contrary. The presence of Jarvis’s three effects leads Paquot to conclude that the use of on the contrary by French-speaking learners is (at least partly) L1-induced.9 5.

Comparison of Granger’s (1996) ICM and Jarvis’s (2000) framework

Granger’s (1996) and Jarvis’s (2000) models share a number of important features. The most obvious one is that they are both concerned with the phenomenon of transfer. In addition, although Jarvis does not use these specific terms, the two models approach transfer by combining contrastive analysis (comparison of two or more languages) and contrastive interlanguage analysis (comparison of two or more varieties of a language, including non-native language). While the specific types of comparison within CA and CIA are essentially different, as we will see below, there is one type which is shared by the two models, namely the comparison of several non-native varieties of the same language (ILa/ILb…ILz, which corresponds to Jarvis’s second effect, interL1-group heterogeneity in learners’ IL performance). Finally, Granger and Jarvis both acknowledge the existence of a number of outside variables that should be rigorously controlled. While these variables are not part of the ICM as such, Granger (1996: 44) underlines their importance, with particular emphasis on the

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type of target language exposure (foreign or second language), the target language proficiency and the task type. In fact, the learner corpus she uses to test the ICM, the International Corpus of Learner English, has been carefully designed so as to keep these three variables constant (foreign language rather than second language, advanced proficiency level10 and essay writing) and has been encoded with additional variables which can easily be manipulated when selecting the data, e.g. amount of L2 exposure, knowledge of other foreign languages, gender, task setting, etc (see Granger 2003). Next to these similarities, the two models also present differences. Despite their common research object (transfer), the models have slightly different goals. The ICM, as we saw, has both a predictive and a diagnostic goal, whereas Jarvis’s model simply aims to identify instances of transfer. Second, Granger and Jarvis use different data – corpus data and experimental data, respectively – although, as illustrated by Paquot’s (2006) study, Jarvis’s model can be operationalised by means of corpus data as well. The models also differ with respect to the types of CA and CIA analyses they advocate. For Granger, the contrastive analysis should consist in a comparison of the target language and the learner’s mother tongue (either as original languages in a comparable corpus or as source and translated languages in a parallel corpus). Jarvis, on the other hand, proposes the comparison of the learner’s mother tongue with his/her interlanguage (see endnote 5 on why this is considered a case of CA). In terms of contrastive interlanguage analysis, besides the common ILa/ILb…ILz comparison, Granger includes as an individual (and essential) component of her model a comparison of the interlanguage and its native counterpart. Jarvis uses this type of comparison too, but only as part of the larger IL-IL comparative analysis, treating NL2 as if it were another IL. Moreover, he regards this type of evidence as unreliable (Jarvis 2000: 300). Finally, Jarvis, unlike Granger, includes in his model a comparison of the interlanguage of several learners from the same mother tongue background. The similarities and differences between the two models are summarised in Table 2. It will appear from the next section that all these elements have a role to play in a model of transfer, but that they serve different purposes. Table 2. Comparison of the features of Granger’s ICM and Jarvis’s framework Granger’s (1996) ICM Jarvis’s (2000) framework Object of study = transfer Combination of CA and CIA ILa/ILb…ILz Control of outside variables Predictive and diagnostic Identification Corpus data Experimental data (but applicable to corpus data) NL1 vs. IL L1 vs. L2 (OL1/OL2 or SL1/2/TL2/1) NL2 vs. IL as an individual component ILa vs. ILa

Combining contrastive and interlanguage analysis 6.

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Towards a comprehensive model of transfer: the DEE transfer model

The advantage of using authentic corpus data has been briefly demonstrated in Section 3, both for CA and CIA (see also Ellis & Barkhuizen 2005 on the value of naturally-occurring samples of learner language for investigating second language acquisition). The importance of considering outside variables has also been underlined by Granger and Jarvis, as well as other authors (e.g. Ellis 1994). This section will therefore focus on the six types of comparison borrowed from Granger’s and Jarvis’s models (see Table 1), and deal with them according to the primary purpose they serve, namely detection, explanation or evaluation.11 The resulting model, the DEE transfer model, does not pretend to be a theory of transfer, but it proposes a methodology which seeks to apprehend transfer in a way that takes several of its facets into account, thus striving for a comprehensive view of the phenomenon. 6.1

Detection of transfer

Two types of comparison serve the primary purpose of detecting the (potential) presence of transfer, viz. NL1 vs. IL and ILa vs. ILb (or more precisely ILa vs. ILb vs. … vs. ILz). Of these, the first one is an instance of CA and the second one, an instance of CIA, so that the detection of transfer relies on the combination of CA and CIA, as is also the case in Granger (1996) and Jarvis (2000). While ILa/ILb…ILz is common to both models, NL1/IL is only found in Jarvis’s model. The comparison of the learner’s interlanguage with his/her mother tongue (NL1 vs. IL) is essential to detect transfer. Only if one can establish a similarity between the learner’s behaviour in IL and NL1 does the presence of transfer seem plausible enough.12 The operationalisation of the NL1/IL comparison may involve frequency, as proposed by Paquot (2008), with the requirement that the frequency of the NL1 item be as close as possible to that of the IL item (cf. frequency of au contraire in native French and of on the contrary in learner English in Paquot’s [2006] study). The similarity may also be formal, in which case the method of reversed translation, which translates interlanguage back into the learner’s mother tongue, may be helpful.13 Thus, disregarding frequency, it is clear that in fact may be considered as the formal equivalent of French en fait (en corresponds to the preposition in and fait is the French noun for fact; both expressions have the same function of adding information to emphasise what has just been said). Similarly, from a formal point of view, on the contrary would be the nearest equivalent of French au contraire, with contraire being related to contrary (more, for example, than to contrast – cf. by contrast – which has another equivalent in French, contraste). Using the method of reversed translation, Borgatti (2006) discovered that 57% of the occurrences of the verb make in the interlanguage of Frenchspeaking advanced learners could be translated into French by means of the equivalent verb faire (e.g. make sacrifices = faire des sacrifices).14 Interestingly, he also found out that 83% of all the erroneous uses of make corresponded to French faire (e.g. *make a description, translatable into French by faire une

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description), which strongly suggests that these errors are due to negative transfer. It should be noted that the method of reversed translation involves authentic learner data and that contrastive corpus data may be helpful in identifying translational equivalence (see below). However, the comparison itself does not rely on corpus data, but on the researcher’s capacity to translate learners’ interlanguage back into their mother tongue. In that, it stands as an exception to the generally corpus-based approach of the DEE transfer model. NL1/IL congruity is not enough to establish transfer with some degree of confidence. This is because a learner’s behaviour may be similar to his/her mother tongue, but also similar to the behaviour of learners from other mother tongue backgrounds, in which case the most likely explanation is not interlingual (i.e. due to L1 influence), but intralingual (i.e. due to the inherent difficulties of learning L2).15 The examination of the relationship between the learner’s interlanguage and the interlanguage of learners from other mother tongue backgrounds (ILa/ILb…ILz) should therefore come as a complement to the NL1/IL comparison. On the basis of a simple NL1/IL comparison, one may for instance come to the conclusion that the overuse of more and more by French-speaking learners is due to transfer, given that the frequency of this expression in their interlanguage is very similar to the frequency of its French counterpart, de plus en plus, in a comparable corpus of native French (CODIF, see Section 6.4). Examining data produced by learners from other mother tongue backgrounds, however, reveals that the overuse of more and more is a general characteristic of learner English, since out of the 16 L1 backgrounds represented in ICLE, Version 2 (Granger et al. forthcoming), 14 present such an overuse (statistically significant at the 0.001 level). While transfer cannot be totally excluded in the case of French-speaking learners, it seems as if intralingual factors prevail here. Since both Granger and Jarvis agree on the necessity of this type of comparison, we will not discuss it any longer. One may wonder why the comparison of the two languages involved has been operationalised through an NL1/IL analysis, rather than an OL1/OL2 or SL1/2/TL2/1 analysis as is the case in the Integrated Contrastive Model. In contrast with the latter two types of comparison, the NL1/IL analysis makes it possible to approach the learner’s interlanguage as an independent linguistic system. Comparing the two native languages in their original (or source and translated) forms and directly applying these results to the question of transfer (i.e. the relationship between the learner’s interlanguage and his/her mother tongue) would imply equating the interlanguage and the target language. However, several second language acquisition specialists have guarded against such an equation, underlining the dangers of what is called the “comparative fallacy”, i.e. “the failure […] to take the structure of the interlanguage on its own terms and a reliance on a comparison of the target language in order to study the structure of the interlanguage” (Bley-Vroman 1983: 3-4). It will be argued later that the criticism levelled by some against the native norm in interlanguage study is not necessarily justified, but it is still true that the learner’s interlanguage, not the target language, should be taken as a baseline for the comparison with NL1, since

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equivalence (or lack of equivalence) between NL1 and NL2 does not necessarily imply a similar relationship between NL1 and IL. Thus, there may be no correspondence in a parallel corpus between English sit on the bus and French être assis sur le bus, the latter describing someone sitting on the roof of a bus, but reversed translation would highlight the equivalence between the two expressions, since sur le bus is a literal translation of on the bus. It would also suggest that an English-speaking learner of French using the preposition sur in such cases is probably acting under the influence of English. The inappropriateness of bilingual corpora to deal with the relationship between the learner’s interlanguage and his/her mother tongue is also particularly evident in the case of non-target forms in the learner’s IL. The French component of ICLE (ICLE-FR) contains the expression make abstraction of, standing for disregard. An OL1/OL2 or SL1/2/TL2/1 comparison would fail to establish a correspondence between these two items, since make abstraction of does not exist in the NL2 system. Using the method of reversed translation, however, one may draw a parallel between make abstraction of and French faire abstraction de, thus showing that transfer is a likely explanation for the IL behaviour. What precedes should not be taken to mean that OL1/OL2 or SL1/2/TL2/1 comparisons have no role to play in the detection of transfer, or that NL2 is completely out of the picture because of the comparative fallacy. Comparable or parallel corpora may be necessary before the NL1/IL comparison proper, to identify the best candidate for translational equivalence. In the case of cognates (e.g. fait/fact, description/description), the equivalence is easily established. In some other cases, however, it may be more difficult, especially for non-native speakers of the learner’s L1, to determine the most probable equivalent. It is here that bilingual corpora may help, by showing in context what words fulfil the same function and express the same meaning in the learner’s mother tongue and in the target language.16 As Danchev (1991: 89) puts it, translation obviates “the familiar difficulty of establishing comparatibility”. (See, however, Section 7 for an important caveat.) As for NL2, it is often necessary as a baseline for comparing the frequencies of an item in IL and NL1. The difference in frequency between nevertheless in French learners’ IL and the equivalent néanmoins in a comparable corpus of native French may at first sight appear too great to be the result of transfer, with a relative frequency of 327 per million words for the former and 206 per million words for the latter. However, compared with the frequency of nevertheless in native English, which amounts to a mere 9 occurrences per million words, this difference between IL and NL1 becomes insignificant, thus making the transfer hypothesis more likely. Despite their possible participation in the detection of transfer, OL1/OL2, SL1/2/TL2/1 and NL2/IL comparisons have another, primary role to play in the DEE transfer model. The first two types of comparison make it possible to explain the presence, or otherwise, of L1 influence, whereas the last type of comparison is especially helpful in a more applied context, when evaluating whether an observed phenomenon of transfer should have consequences in

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foreign language teaching. These two roles, explanation and evaluation, are described in the next two sections. 6.2

Explanation of transfer

The existence of a formal equivalent in the other language system is not necessarily sufficient to lead to transfer. Thus, although both Swedish and French have structures corresponding to causative make + infinitive (with få in Swedish and faire in French), transfer seems to be at work only in the case of Swedish learners (compare Altenberg 2002 and Gilquin 2000/2001). This difference in IL behaviour may be explained by resorting to the concept of “language distance”, that is “the degree of similarity between two languages” (Odlin 1989: 32). As noted by Ellis (1994: 327), “[t]here is substantial evidence to indicate that the actual distance between the native and the target languages acts as a constraint on transfer”. Equivalents which are identical in all respects between the two language systems are therefore more likely to be transferred than equivalents which present differences.17 The degree of cross-linguistic equivalence can be established on the basis of parallel corpus data (SL1/2 vs. TL2/1). A useful measure here is that of “mutual translatability” (or “mutual correspondence”), which refers to the frequency with which two items are translated as one another (on this concept, see Altenberg 1999). A value of 0% would indicate that the two items are never translated as one another, and a value of 100%, that the two items are always translated as one another. If we apply this measure to causative constructions in parallel corpus data of English and Swedish on the one hand (Altenberg 2002), and English and French on the other (Gilquin 2000/2001), a noticeable difference emerges. While causative make and its Swedish equivalent få exhibit a mutual translatability of 52%, in the case of causative make and its French equivalent faire, the value is under 14%.18 Considering all the English equivalents of causative faire in a sample of the parallel corpus PLECI19 (from source texts to translations and vice versa), for example, it turns out that a synthetic causative verb is the preferred option, with a total percentage of 56.7% (Gilquin 2000/2001: 105). This is illustrated by (1), where faire disparaître (‘make disappear’) corresponds to dispel. (1)

Aussitôt qu’elle avait établi son bon droit, elle s’efforçait de faire disparaître toute trace de ressentiment chez son adversaire. = Her own way once insisted upon and secured she was swift to dispel any smallest hint of unpleasantness. (PLECI fiction TF-OE)

The degree of cross-linguistic equivalence between two items can also be established by means of a comparable corpus (OL1 vs. OL2), preferably as a supplement to the parallel corpus analysis. While this approach does not make it possible to identify the word or construction corresponding to the target item in a specific context, since the texts are not translations of each other, it has the

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advantage of not being affected by any possible translation effects (“translationese”, see Gellerstam 1986). By carefully comparing the factors conditioning the use of two supposedly equivalent items in authentic original data, one may gain insight into the extent to which the two items overlap in terms of, say, lexical preferences, pragmatic functions or syntactic patterns. This, in turn, may help determine the “distance” between the two items and hence the likelihood of transfer. In the case of English and French causative constructions, the analysis of the comparable corpus data confirms the low degree of equivalence brought to light by the parallel corpus analysis (see Gilquin forthcoming). To give but one example, a sample of original texts from the PLECI corpus shows that causative constructions with faire are quite frequently causeeless, i.e. with no mention of the entity changed or influenced by the subject (this represents over one quarter of all the occurrences of causative faire), cf. (2). In English, by contrast, causeeless constructions with make are limited to the idiomatic expressions make believe and make do, which, incidentally, are not found in the PLECI corpus. (2)

Fais vérifier ses papiers. ‘Make check his papers’ Make someone check his papers/Have his papers checked. (PLECI fiction OF-TE)

In sum, OL1/OL2 and SL1/2/TL2/1 comparisons, by highlighting the degree of similarity between two items cross-linguistically, may provide an explanation for the presence or absence of transfer among learners. Two remarks are in order, here. The first one is that, although in what precedes the bilingual corpus data have been presented as a way of explaining transfer, thus corresponding to the diagnostic hypothesis of Granger’s model, they may also be used with a predictive goal, as a way of predicting where transfer is likely to occur or not. In other words, the OL1/OL2 and SL1/2/TL2/1 comparisons may precede or follow the detection of transfer, or indeed, as advocated by Granger, occur at different stages in the analysis. The second remark is that, in the same way as distance between two languages is a matter of degree (cf. degree of mutual translatability or degree of overlap between the conditioning factors of two items), the likelihood of transfer may be relatively high or low. One cannot determine a threshold below which transfer becomes impossible, so that both the explanatory (or diagnostic) power and the predictive power of the DEE transfer model are hypothetical, as in the Integrated Contrastive Model. 6.3

Evaluation of transfer

The two remaining types of comparison found in Granger (1996) and Jarvis (2000), NL2/IL and ILa/ILa, also have a role to play in a comprehensive model of transfer. However, while Granger and Jarvis use these comparisons as (partial) evidence for transfer, they will be assumed here to be mainly (though by no

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means only) useful for pedagogical purposes, as a way of evaluating whether the presence of transfer should affect foreign language teaching (FLT) or not.20 Once a phenomenon of transfer has been detected with a certain degree of likelihood, a comparison of the interlanguage and the target native language (NL2) is necessary to distinguish between positive and negative transfer. Consider the expressions according to me and according to X (X being another entity than the subject) as used by French-speaking learners of English. Applying the criteria established in Section 6.1, one can detect possible traces of transfer in both cases, from French selon moi and selon X respectively. However, it takes an examination (or at least knowledge) of NL2 to reveal that according to me, unlike according to X, is not acceptable in native English. The presence of according to me in French-speaking learners’ interlanguage may therefore be described as a case of negative transfer, that is, a case where learners produce a non-target form in the interlanguage as a result of negative influence of their mother tongue, whereas the presence of according to X could be a case of positive transfer, where learners produce a target form in the interlanguage as a result of positive influence of their mother tongue. Note that the comparison with native data is not only necessary to distinguish between cases of positive and negative transfer of form, but also of frequency.21 By transferring the frequency of an item from NL1 to IL, a learner may “hit the right amount” (positive transfer), or s/he may overuse or underuse the item (negative transfer). The apparent positive transfer of form of according to X among French-speaking learners of English is accompanied by what looks like a positive transfer of frequency, with no statistically significant difference in frequency between non-native and native English. Negative transfer, on the other hand, seems to be at work in French-speaking learners’ overuse of on the contrary (see above). Given the time constraints that exist in the FLT classroom, it is best to focus on instances of negative transfer (e.g. the use of according to me or the overuse of on the contrary), showing learners how to avoid it (negative feedback), and let positive transfer (e.g. the use of according to X) make its way into the interlanguage. This, of course, implies that one takes native language as a target for foreign language learners, which may sound like a debatable issue in view of the “comparative fallacy” hypothesis (Bley-Vroman 1983) and the movement of English as a Lingua Franca (or English as an International Language, see e.g. Jenkins 2000, Seidlhofer 2001, Mauranen 2003), which both stigmatise the NL norm. However, I would like to argue that the native language still has a proper place (and an important one) in FLT contexts.22 In a survey conducted among some 200 students, Mukherjee (2005) found that 80% of the subjects chose a national variety of native English as the norm they wanted to approximate to (47% for British English, 30.5% for American English and 2.5% for other national varieties). By contrast, less than 17% of the subjects accepted as their target norm the English used by competent non-native speakers in international contexts. Although native English may not be the norm aimed at by all learners (many of the students who took part in Mukherjee’s survey were future English teachers; the results might have been different with, say, business

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students), it is still a target norm for some of them. In addition, especially in the early stages of FLT, students may not know what type of norm they will need in their future interactions (e.g. only comprehensible to non-native speakers, or also comprehensible to native speakers) and teachers may have to address mixed groups of learners, some of them aiming at a native norm and others happy to speak English as competent non-native speakers. Native language, therefore, appears as a reasonable common target in FLT education, and one which is relatively well-defined.23 Like NL2/IL comparisons, ILa/ILa comparisons will be taken here to be mainly useful for evaluative purposes. The fact that an item is used by only a few learners within an L1-group does not perforce exclude the possibility of transfer. In fact, it has been regularly pointed out in the literature on transfer that “the extent to which the L1 influences L2 development can vary strongly from individual to individual” (Kellerman 1995: 133).24 Going back to the expression make abstraction of (see Section 6.1), there is no doubt that it is the result of transfer from French, although it occurs only once in ICLE-FR. Given its low frequency, however, it is less interesting in an FLT context than an expression such as according to me, which is found in ICLE-FR with a relative frequency of almost 10 occurrences per 100,000 words. By establishing the probability of a particular transfer-related phenomenon, ILa/ILa comparisons, therefore, provide relevant information to go through the inevitable process of material selection in the FLT curriculum. The model of transfer proposed here, with its six types of comparison and three main stages, is illustrated in Figure 2. In what follows, the model will be applied to the use of even if by French-speaking learners of English. 6.4

Case study: the use of even if by French-speaking learners

This section presents a case study using the DEE transfer model. More precisely, we will go through the stages of detection, explanation and evaluation in order to study any phenomenon of transfer that might be attached to French-speaking learners’ use of the expression even if. The learner corpus data on which the study is based come from ICLE Version 2 (Granger et al. forthcoming). Like all the data from this corpus (see Section 5), the selected data keep three variables constant, namely type of learner (foreign language learner rather than second language learner), stage of learning (advanced level) and text type (essay writing). A number of additional variables were controlled for when selecting the samples: mother tongue background (French), text type (argumentative essays) and conditions of writing (untimed and with reference tools). Finally, only those samples that contained at least 100,000 words after applying the above criteria were kept in the final analysis.25 Table 3 presents the word counts of the remaining nine components. In addition, comparable corpora of native French and native English were used in the study – 208,419 words from the Corpus de Dissertations Françaises (CODIF) and 328,406 words from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) – as well as French-English corpus data from PLECI.26

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Figure 2. The DEE transfer model

Table 3. Word counts of ICLE samples ICLE component Czech (ICLE-CZ) Dutch (ICLE-DU) Finnish (ICLE-FI) French (ICLE-FR) German (ICLE-GE) Polish (ICLE-PO) Russian (ICLE-RU) Spanish (ICLE-SP) Turkish (ICLE-TU) TOTAL

Number of words 131,435 163,908 126,599 137,431 110,890 141,535 168,046 99,905 105,006 1,184,755

Detection of transfer according to the DEE transfer model involves two types of comparison, viz. NL1/IL and ILa/ILb…ILz. A reversed translation of even if points to même si as a formal equivalent, both as a multi-word unit and as individual words (even = même; if = si). This equivalence is confirmed by the corpus data. The first type of comparison also reveals a striking similarity in

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frequency between even if in ICLE-FR and même si in the corpus of native French essays, with a relative frequency of 458.41 and 489.40 occurrences per million words respectively.27 The inter-L1-group comparison (ILa/ILb…ILz), the results of which are displayed in Table 4, shows that, despite the variability among the L1 groups, French-speaking learners’ behaviour differs markedly from that of the other learners. ICLE-FR emerges as the ICLE component which has the highest relative frequency of even if, and a Ryan procedure (REGWQ) indicates that French-speaking learners distinguish themselves significantly from all the other learner populations in their use of even if.28 These two comparisons suggest that there might be a phenomenon of transfer from French même si to French-speaking learners’ IL even if.29 Table 4. Frequency of even if in ICLE samples ICLE component ICLE-FR ICLE-FI ICLE-GE ICLE-PO ICLE-CZ ICLE-RU ICLE-TU ICLE-DU ICLE-SP

Absolute frequency 63 35 26 30 26 26 12 17 7

Relative frequency per million words 458.41 276.46 234.47 211.96 197.82 154.72 114.28 103.72 70.07

Going on to the next stage, that of explanation, we can use bilingual corpus data to examine the degree of equivalence between English even if and French même si. Parallel corpus data from PLECI reveal a relatively high degree of correspondence between the two expressions. Out of 61 occurrences of even if, 40 correspond to même si in French, e.g. (3). (3)

Dès lors, on comprend pourquoi la solution négociée arrangerait les affaires de tout le monde, la France et les Nations unies devant se targuer d’avoir provisoirement marqué un point, même si Washington, inquiet de la triple entente Kinshasa-Tripoli-Khartoum, n’a pas encore dit son dernier mot. = Clearly, a negotiated solution would be in everybody’s interest. It would enable both France and the UN to score a point, at least temporarily, even if Washington, worried by the triple alliance between Kinshasa, Tripoli and Khartoum, may not have said its last word. (PLECI non-fiction OF-TE)

However, it also appears from the SL1/2/TL2/1 and OL1/OL2 comparisons that even if and même si do not always fulfil the same function. In particular, while even if

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is exclusively used to introduce a condition, même si can also introduce a concession, as in (4), where même si corresponds to English even though. (4)

Or, dans les sociétés africaines traditionnelles, on demande toujours l’avis des femmes avant de prendre une décision, même si celles-ci ne parlent jamais en public. = But in traditional African societies the women are always asked for their opinion before a decision is taken, even though they never speak in public. (PLECI non-fiction OF-TE)

Although the equivalence between even if and même si is only partial, the high degree of correspondence between the two expressions and the inclusion of even if in the functional field of même si suggest that there is little distance between the expressions and thus serve to explain French-speaking learners’ readiness to transfer the form, function and frequency of même si into their IL (see next paragraph on the transfer of function). In terms of evaluation, finally, the comparison between NL2 and IL underlines the negative nature of the transfer, and hence the relevance such material may have in an FLT context. This negative transfer manifests itself in two ways. First, it takes the form of an overuse of even if by French-speaking learners, as appears from Table 5 (Ȥ² = 60.24, statistically significant at the 0.001 level). Second, it results in a number of incorrect uses of the expression, in contexts where a concession, rather than a condition, is introduced. This type of error is illustrated by (5), where a native speaker would have used even though instead of even if.30 As noted earlier, même si can fulfil a concessive function, which makes the influence of L1 quite clear in such cases.31 These two types of negative transfer stress the importance of drawing French-speaking learners’ attention to the native-like use of even if. Table 5. Frequency of even if in learner English (ICLE-FR) and native English Language variety Learner English (ICLE-FR) Native English (5)

Absolute frequency 63 33

Relative frequency per million words 458.41 100.49

The problem is that even if such an international principle for equality has been established, some countries still keep on violating it (mostly in countries where religion prevails over international rights). (ICLE-FR)

This point is reinforced by the intra-L1-group comparison (ILa/ILa), which shows that the use of even if is not limited to a few learners only. Querying each essay from ICLE-FR separately, one notices that the expression occurs in 22.37% of them (51 essays out of 228). While this proportion may seem relatively low, it

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roughly corresponds to the proportion with which frequent words such as difficult, look, feel or idea occur, as emphasised by Paquot & Fairon (2006). This brief case study has illustrated the operationalisation of the DEE transfer model, as described in Sections 6.1 to 6.3. While this model makes it possible to shed light on some important aspects of the phenomenon of transfer, it does not pretend to answer all questions related to the issue. In the next section, we examine some possible limitations of the model. 7.

Some limitations of the DEE transfer model

In what follows, three possible limitations of the DEE transfer model are briefly discussed, one having to do with the CA component, the other with the CIA component and the last one with the model in general. The discussion, at the same time, opens up possibilities for further improving the model, in an attempt to achieve an even better understanding of transfer. A first and, in my view, major limitation of the DEE transfer model as it stands is that, in its investigation of the relation between L1 and L2, it only takes account of the objective distance, as evidenced in parallel or comparable corpora. Since transfer is a phenomenon that takes place first and foremost in the learner’s cognitive system, however, what really counts is not the objective distance between two items, but the distance as it is perceived by the learner, that is, the learner’s psychotypology (cf. Kellerman 1983).32 If a learner perceives two expressions as similar, this may lead him/her to transfer the characteristics of the L1 expression to the L2 expression, no matter whether the two expressions actually correspond to each other in authentic language data. On the other hand, if two expressions are not connected with each other in the learner’s mental lexicon, their objective similarity is very unlikely to trigger transfer-related phenomena. While objective distance may be an indication of subjective distance (Gilquin 2000/2001), the ideal would be to probe directly into learners’ perceptions. This could be done by means of elicitation tests, asking learners to provide the translational equivalent of a word or expression presented to them. The results of such tests might provide an explanation for some cases of transfer not accounted for by bilingual corpus data. Thus, the use of indeed by French-speaking learners presents all the signs of transfer. Its frequency in ICLE-FR is very different from its frequency in all the other ICLE components, but very similar to the frequency of its intuitive equivalent en effet in a comparable corpus of native French. It is also significantly overused in ICLE-FR (unlike the other ICLE components, which display an underuse or no significant difference) and appears in a large proportion of essays, which makes it particularly relevant to FLT. However, what seems to be lacking is an explanation for this transfer, since parallel corpus data from PLECI reveal a very low degree of correspondence, with only 4 out of 48 occurrences of indeed translated as en effet,33 and hence, a great (objective) distance between the two expressions. A test carried out among 23 Frenchspeaking advanced learners of English, however, shows that en effet is perceived

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as the direct equivalent of indeed by most of them (20 learners).34 The subjective similarity between indeed and en effet, therefore, explains why transfer is possible, although the expressions are, in reality, quite different. Inaccurate perception may also be at work in the case of so-called false friends. A learner may establish a link between, say, actually and actuellement (French for ‘at the moment’) because of the formal similarity between the words, but no bilingual corpus, or, indeed, competent “reversed” translator would suggest such a link. Elicitation data, because they offer more direct access to the learner’s mental lexicon, may explain phenomena unaccounted for by the corpus data and would, for this reason, deserve a place in the DEE transfer model. Turning to the CIA component, it has been argued earlier that, despite recent criticism, a native norm is still useful in the study of transfer. However, what this norm should be is still very much an open question. In the case study of Section 6.4, the English native data were extracted from LOCNESS, a corpus of essays written by American and British students. American English and British English, however, display some differences, as is well known, and it might not be such a good idea to mix the two varieties. If only one variety is chosen, on the other hand, which one should it be? British English, American English or yet another national variety of English? Han (2004: 232) argues that the norm against which the interlanguage is examined should be “what the subjects have been exposed to”, but for foreign language learners, exposure might be limited to English as spoken by a non-native teacher. Some may also argue that a corpus of expert writing is what is needed, not a corpus of novice writing, since learners (or at least, some learners) ultimately aim to become expert writers. The problem is that the choice of the norm may affect the results of the analysis. An example of this is the word chance, which has a direct (though partly deceptive) equivalent in French, chance. Compared with data from LOCNESS, ICLE-FR reveals no significant difference in frequency (Ȥ² = 1.51). Compared with a corpus of expert academic writing, however, the difference becomes significant (Ȥ² = 22.64, p biclausal sentences > multiclausal sentences x degree of integration: juxtaposition > subordination > infinitival/participial > nominalisation clauses x degree of ellipsis: full constructions > subject ellipsis (elliptical coord.) > elliptical clauses (inf./part.)

Figure 2. Continuum representing the increasing syntactic complexity of sentences4 (from Bartning & Kirchmeyer 2003: 19) According to Bartning & Kirchmeyer (2003: 19-20), the development towards the use of more complex, more integrated and more elliptical structures is accompanied by an increasing ability of the learners to plan their discourse, to organise information hierarchically and to think in a more abstract way in a foreign language. Thus, the use of syntactically more complex structures means that the tasks of planning, organising and abstracting become increasingly important, and represent a considerable cognitive burden for the learner. This probably explains why the use of very integrated and complex structures only occurs at more advanced stages, since less proficient learners are already dealing with morpho-syntactic and lexical difficulties of other kinds. These take up much of their cognitive effort on the one hand, and on the other hand, may inhibit the use of complex constructions because the learner has not mastered the necessary tools. Other studies in second language acquisition (SLA) (Chini 2003, Lambert et al. 2003) have mainly concentrated on the presence and the role of subordinate clauses in learner language. None of them, however, include Dutch. Lambert et al. (2003: 49) deal with very advanced French- and German-speaking learners of English, whose film retellings are compared to those of native speakers of

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English, French and German. Table 1 shows that the proportion of subordinate clauses differs in the native speakers’ texts: whereas subordinate clauses account for 19.1% of all clauses in the English language corpus, they only make up 11.2% of the German corpus, but represent 37% of the French corpus. The results for French and English confirm the descriptions of these languages in the previous section. German-speaking learners of English use even fewer subordinate clauses in English than in their native language (9.4%). French-speaking learners of English also reduce their use of hypotactic structures below that of their native language, although they still use them considerably more than the native speakers of English (30.9%). Table 1. Proportion of subordinate clauses (adapted from Lambert et al. 2003: 50) English Subordinate clauses/total clauses % subordination

742/3,886 19.1%

German

French

Ger. L1/ Eng. L2

Fr. L1/ Eng. L2

366/2,740 850/2,297

274/2,908

617/1,997

9.4%

30.9%

11.2%

37.0%

Lambert et al. (2003) also observed that the less advanced learners who participated in their research stuck closely to the chronology of events in the films they were describing. They created the necessary conditions for topic continuity (with the protagonist in subject position). This basic organisational mode has been observed in other studies dealing with other combinations of native languages and interlanguages, and is called the “prototypical treatment” (Watorek 1996). It appears to be a typical feature of the interlanguage system, which occurs at relatively early stages in the acquisition process. However it is still used by quite advanced learners who are confronted with a very complex verbal task, to simplify the task and manage all the cognitive and linguistic processes in on-line experiments (Lambert et al. 2003: 61). Chini (2003) examined the frequency and functions of subordinate clauses in the interlanguage of learners who have reached varying degrees of post-basic proficiency. She points out clearly that the presence of more complex syntactic structures depends not only on the increasing complexity of the interlanguage, or the characteristics of the mother tongue and/or target language, but also on the personal stylistic preferences of the subjects and the rhetorical effects they are pursuing. The data in Chini’s (2003) study are film retellings of the silent movie Modern Times5 starring Charlie Chaplin, produced by eighteen German learners of Italian, thirteen native speakers of Italian and ten native speakers of German. The learners were divided into four groups according to their proficiency level, ranging from post-basic to advanced. First, the narratives produced by eight learners from across the groups were compared to the native-speaker data in

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terms of the proportion of subordinate clauses in general, and of complement clauses, relative clauses, pseudo-relative clauses (a category typical of Italian which we will not consider) and adverbial clauses in particular. As Table 2 shows, the percentage of subordinate clauses (as opposed to the total number of clauses) is somewhat smaller in the learner data: 27.4%, compared to 33.3% in Italian and 32.4% in German.6 In addition, the learners use fewer non-finite subordinate clauses than the native speakers of Italian, which coincides with the results reported by Bartning & Kirchmeyer (2003). Chini (2003) does not provide the data for German in this respect. Table 2. Proportion of subordinate and non-finite clauses in Chini (adapted from Chini 2003: 81, 83)

Subordinate clauses/total clauses % subordination Number of infinitival clauses Number of gerund clauses Number of participial clauses Total non-finite clauses % non-finite clauses (total subordinate clauses)

German

Italian

116/358 32.4% -

544/1,631 33.3% 109 25 4 138 25% (138/544)

-

Ger. L1/ Italian L2 234/864 27% 40 3 0 43 18.4% 43/234

Finally it is worth pointing out that Chini draws a parallel between the use of paratactic structures and that of over-explicit referential expressions, and suggests that these choices are linked to more local planning and elaboration strategies. These in turn lead to an element-by-element treatment, and the connections between the clauses and sentences are mainly implicit. 3.

Research hypotheses and methodology

The following global hypothesis was formulated in accord with the contrastive literature reviewed in Section 2: MAIN HYPOTHESIS: Dutch-speaking learners of French and French-speaking learners of Dutch encounter difficulties when writing narratives in their second language because they have to apply, respectively, a more hierarchic or vertical discourse organisation, and a more incremental or horizontal discourse organisation in their L2 than they are accustomed to in their L1. In order to test this hypothesis and pinpoint specific problems, several subhypotheses and research questions were formulated. These concern the degree of

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packaging, the degree of dependency and the degree of integration. They are related to the global hypothesis as shown in Figure 3. Hierarchic or vertical discourse organisation + + +

degree of packaging degree of dependency degree of integration

Incremental or horizontal discourse organisation   

Figure 3. Relationships between the type of discourse organisation and the degree of packaging, dependency and integration. 3.1

The degree of packaging

Bartning & Kirchmeyer (2003) introduced the idea of degree of packaging (“degré d’empaquetage”). It will be examined by taking account of: o o

the average number of clauses per sentence; and the proportions of mono-, bi- and multi-clausal sentences.

With this objective in mind, a fairly traditional approach was adopted (see, among others, Riegel et al. 1994: 472). This consists of defining a sentence on the basis of graphic features (i.e. a capital letter at the beginning and a full stop or question/exclamation mark at the end) and a clause on the basis of the presence of (at least) a subject (which can, of course, remain implicit)7 and a predicate. Sentences were classified as simple (consisting of one clause), complex (biclausal) or multiple (consisting of more than two clauses). Various combinations are possible within any one sentence. The following example illustrates this approach: (1)

(i) Là il fait un festin de roi et (iii) se présentant à la caisse, (ii) appelle l’agent de quartier lui-même (iv) en l’accostant par un signe de la main. (FR L1) ‘(i) There he dines in royal style and, (iii) presenting himself at the cash desk, (ii) he himself calls the local policeman (iv) by signalling to him with his hand.’

This is a multiple sentence, which contains an independent clause (i), coordinated to (ii) a main clause, which is in turn preceded by (iii) a participial clause and followed by (iv) another participial clause (constructed around a gerund). The following sub-hypothesis was formulated with respect to the degree of packaging: SUB-HYPOTHESIS 1: French is expected to exhibit a higher degree of packaging than Dutch, as shown by:

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a higher average number of clauses per sentence; and a higher proportion of multiple sentences.

Accordingly, the following research question was posed: INTERLANGUAGE RESEARCH QUESTION 1: Do the learner data present a similar degree of packaging, do they present a degree of packaging similar to that of the learners’ L1 or have the packaging characteristics of the L2 already been acquired at the (lower) advanced stage? 3.2

The degree of dependency

The degree of dependency was evaluated by examining the frequency of parataxis (juxtaposition and coordination) and hypotaxis (subordination and secondary predication). According to Lehmann (1988), hypotaxis, which traditionally covers all kinds of subordinate clauses, is the result of a process he calls “hierarchical downgrading”. The following sub-hypothesis on dependency will be tested: SUB-HYPOTHESIS 2: French native speakers use hypotaxis more frequently than Dutch ones, who prefer parataxis. French narratives written in French therefore present a higher degree of dependency than narratives written in Dutch. With respect to the interlanguage of the two learner groups, the present study sets out to answer the following question: INTERLANGUAGE RESEARCH QUESTION 2: Do the narratives of language learners show a preference for parataxis in general, do they manifest the same tendencies as narratives written in the learners’ L1, or have the characteristics of the target language already been acquired? 3.3

The degree of integration

While the degree of dependency is certainly a very important feature of the distinction between more hierarchic and more incremental styles of discourse organisation (see Section 2.2), it is not all-revealing. It is possible to distinguish even further between more and less integrated structures in subordinate clauses (Bartning & Kirchmeyer 2003), taking the description of discourse organisational preferences to a further level. According to Lehmann (1988: 204), a subordinate clause may be desententialised, “turning it into a simple constituent of the main clause”. At the end of this process we find non-finite verb forms and verbal nouns. Thus, example (2a) below presents a more integrated structure than (2b):

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Il prétend qu’il a volé le pain. ‘He claims that he stole the bread.’ Il prétend avoir volé le pain. ‘He claims to have stolen the bread.’

The frequency of finite and non-finite subordinate clauses was examined in the various data-sets. Furthermore, in order to get a more complete picture of the integration process, a distinction was made between non-finite subordinate clauses containing an infinitive, a past or present participle, and a gerund.8 In this, we departed from the rough distinction made by Bartning & Kirchmeyer (2003) between finite and infinitival/participial clauses in terms of different levels of integration. We felt that there was a need for a more fine-grained distinction, to distinguish for instance between (2b) and (2c-d) below: (2c)

(2d)

Buitengekomen uit het restaurant belt de agent naar het commissariaat zodat ze een wagen kunnen sturen om Charlie weg te voeren. (NL L1) ‘Having left the restaurant, the policeman calls the police station so that they can send a car to take Charlie away.’ Laissant vides chacun des plats sur la table, il se dirige vers la sortie où le récupère le gendarme. (FR L1) ‘Leaving every one of the dishes on the table empty, he goes to the exit where the policeman catches him again.’

The participial clauses in (2c) and (2d) do not behave like truly dependent clauses, in the way the finite and the infinitival clauses in (2a) and (2b) do. They resemble more closely detached secondary predications.9 The distinction between truly dependent clauses and detached secondary predication in the form of participial clauses is accounted for by Lehmann (1988). According to his clause linking model (ibid. 185), the participial construction in (2c) and (2d) is “part of the main clause and insofar embedded in it. However, its syntactic function […] is a blend, as it were, of an apposition and an adverbial, and thus not subject to government”. On the continuum of “hierarchical downgrading” (see Figure 4) put forward by Lehmann (1988: 189) the kind of participle used in (2c) and (2d), which he calls a “conjunct participle”, is considered to be less embedded than governed clauses (e.g. the finite clause in [2a] and the infinitival clause in [2b]), but more embedded than independent and adjoined clauses (i.e. paratactic structures). parataxis independent clause

adjoined clause

correlative diptych

medial clause

conjunct participle

embedding governed clause

Figure 4. Hierarchical downgrading (Lehmann 1988: 189) Overall, we distinguished between parataxis (which includes coordination and juxtaposition) and hypotaxis (which covers subordination – with finite or

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non-finite verbs – and secondary predication of a participial kind) in order to give as complete a survey of the degree of dependency and integration as possible.10 Figure 5 summarises the various distinctions that we took into account. It also shows that, although dependency and integration are closely related, they are not synonymous. Dependency level PARATAXIS Juxtaposition Coordination

HYPOTAXIS Secondary predication

Secondary predication (i.e. participial clauses)

Subordination

Integration level Finite Non-finite subordinate subordinate clauses clauses (i.e. infinitives)

Figure 5. Distinction between dependency and integration Our sub-hypothesis with respect to the degree of integration, then, is the following: SUB-HYPOTHESIS 3: French is characterised by a higher degree of integration than Dutch. This means that the French data are expected to contain a higher proportion of more integrated kinds of structures than the Dutch: non-finite subordinate clauses (infinitives and gerunds) > finite subordinate clauses > secondary predication (participial clauses) > coordination > juxtaposition The following question will be addressed in the learner data: INTERLANGUAGE RESEARCH QUESTION 3: Do the narratives of the two learner groups resemble each other with respect to the degree of integration they show, do they have a similar degree of integration to that of the learners’ mother tongue, or do they resemble more closely the usual patterns in the language being learned? Overall, by comparing the degree of packaging, dependency and integration in the Dutch and French interlanguages, we hope to be able to shed some light on the question of whether linear and local treatment are indeed typical features of the interlanguage system, even at a rather advanced stage. Finally, we also took a closer look at the variety of subordinate clauses that native speakers and learners use.

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The data: subjects and task

We analysed the narratives written by 19 Dutch-speaking learners of French and 19 French-speaking learners of Dutch (all Belgians living in Brussels or in the Walloon region of Belgium). These were compared to the writings of 19 native speakers of Dutch and 19 native speakers of French (also all Belgians). The first group (FR L2) consisted of Dutch-speaking students enrolled in the first year of “Language and literature: French + a second language” at Ghent University (GU). These students thought the task to be a preliminary test designed to evaluate their linguistic abilities at the beginning of the academic year. All of them had taken French for eight years.11 The second group (NL L2, where NL refers to Nederlands, the Dutch word for “Dutch”) was composed of ten French-speaking students enrolled in the second year of “Language and literature: Dutch + a second language” at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) and of nine French-speaking students enrolled in the third year of the school for interpreters at Mons. All of these learners also undertook the task as part of their writing class. The native speakers of Dutch (NL L1) were all students enrolled in the Arts and Humanities faculty at Ghent University and fourteen of them had a “language profile”.12 They volunteered for the task, in return for a small fee. The last group (FR L1) consisted of French-speaking students studying Romance languages at the Free University of Belgium (ULB), who completed the task as part of a writing class.13 Since our aim was to compare groups of learners who had reached a fairly advanced stage (based on Bartning 1997 and Bartning & Krichmeyer 2003), we decided to work with French-speaking learners who were in the second and third year of university (rather than the first year, like their Dutch-speaking counterparts), because they had not received the same amount of instruction in Dutch as the Dutch-speaking learners had in French in primary and secondary school (see note 11). For the same reason, this group performed the task near the end of the academic year. Given that the learners had more or less the same level of proficiency, we decided not to perform any within-group analyses, although there was obviously a certain degree of individual variability.14 All the students undertook the same task. They were asked to describe in writing, as accurately as possible, the plot of the Alone and Hungry sequence (12 minutes) of the film Modern Times (cf. Lambert 1997, Chini 2003). They were allowed to take notes while viewing the film, but were not allowed to make a draft of their narrative first. They were given a maximum of one hour for this rather complex task.15

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5.

Corpus findings

5.1

Some preliminary observations

Before we comment on the way information is organised in the four corpora, it must be pointed out that the learners’ narratives differ considerably from the native speakers’ in terms of length, as Table 3 brings out. These differences possibly point to the greater cognitive effort the learners had to make, in comparison with the native speakers, and, consequently, to the fact that they needed more time to activate their procedural knowledge. Table 3. Average length of the narratives Total no. of words per corpus Average no. of words per narrative Average no. of sentences per narrative Average no. of clauses per narrative

FR L1 5,669 298.37 18 44

FR L2 3,394 178.63 13 29

NL L1 5,965 313.95 20 45

NL L2 2,864 203.37 16 34

The complexity of the task and its greater cognitive demands are also related to the fact that five different characters appear in the extract, sometimes simultaneously. Charlie Chaplin is the main protagonist, and the girl he wants to help plays a major role at the beginning of the sequence. The policeman is present during more or less the entire story, whereas the baker and the witness are less important characters, only appearing at the beginning. Do the learners and the native speakers refer to all these characters in the same proportions? Charlie is clearly the protagonist in all four corpora, but he gets some competition from the girl in the FR L2 corpus. These learners focused on the girl at the beginning of their narratives and related in detail what happens to her.16 However, they seem to be unable to maintain the same level of detail afterwards and so give a more condensed account of the adventures of Charlie and the policeman. This suggests some planning difficulties and problems with time management. The learners of the NL L2 corpus seem to experience fewer cognitive (planning) problems.17 5.2

Discourse organisation

5.2.1 The degree of packaging As Cosme (2008) points out, sentence length can be seen as a first indication of syntactic complexity (see also Hannay & Mackenzie 1996: 44). It appears from Table 4 that the native-speaker Dutch sentences (NL L1) contain, on average, only slightly fewer words than the native-speaker French sentences (FR L1). Moreover the sentences in the learner corpora are only slightly shorter than those in the source and target languages. The shortest sentences were produced by the NL L2 group. The average number of clauses per sentence is nearly the same in

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the different corpora, although the NL L2 is again the smallest. A very small overall difference can be observed between French and Dutch, which could perhaps be seen as a first tentative indication of the greater syntactic complexity of French. Both interlanguages closely resemble their target languages in the number of clauses. Table 4. Average number of words and clauses per sentence FR L1 16.62 2.6

Average no. of words Average no. of clauses

FR L2 14.26 2.5

NL L1 15.62 2.3

NL L2 12.46 2.2

Figure 6 shows the average number of simple (mono-clausal), complex (bi-clausal) and multiple (multi-clausal) sentences. This gives a better idea of the actual distribution of clauses over sentences.

9 8 7 6 5

simple

4

complex multiple

3 2 1 0 FR L1

FR L2

NL L1

NL L2

Figure 6. Average number of simple, complex and multiple sentences per narrative Native speakers The average number of simple and multiple sentences is equal in the two sets of native speaker data, although they differ in the number of complex sentences, which are used more often by the Dutch native speakers. Hence, the distribution of the clauses does not seem to provide any support for the hypothesis that Dutch has a choppier style (see Vanderauwera 1985) and French a more complex sentence structure.

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Learners The learners’ narratives are, on average, shorter and contain fewer sentences than the native speakers’, and this is reflected in the frequency of sentence types. Proportionally speaking, the gap between simple sentences on the one hand and complex and multiple sentences on the other appears to be smaller in the learner corpora. The FR L2 corpus contains as many complex as multiple sentences and the fewest simple sentences of all the corpora. The NL L2 corpus resembles the target language corpus (NL L1) with respect to the tendency to use complex sentences. Furthermore, the NL L2 corpus arguably presents the most horizontal or linear discourse organisation in terms of the construction-types examined, since it contains as many simple sentences as multiple sentences, and more simple sentences than the other data sets, and since the most frequently used type of sentence is a complex one. Summary We found only minor differences at the level of packaging: French texts display a slightly higher degree of packaging than Dutch ones, but the difference between the two data sets is certainly not as pronounced as that found by other researchers. Sub-hypothesis 1 is therefore not confirmed by the data. The learner corpora do not point to any clear features that are characteristic of a “general” interlanguage system. Although they contain, on average, approximately the same proportion of clauses as the native speaker corpora (see Table 4), they do seem to have a slightly less complex discourse organisation in terms of the average number of words per sentence and the proportion of simple sentences (and, for the NL L2 group, the proportion of complex sentences). 5.2.2 The degree of dependency In order to gain a better understanding of the internal sentence organisation, we need to examine the different types of clause-linking, i.e. parataxis (juxtaposition and coordination) vs. hypotaxis (subordination and secondary predication). Before we discuss the results for this feature, however, it is necessary to point out that the quantification of types of clause-linking is not a straightforward matter, at least in multiple sentences. In complex sentences, two clauses can be combined through juxtaposition, coordination or subordination. In multiple sentences, one clause can, for instance, be subordinated to another clause, while simultaneously being coordinated to a second subordinate clause. An example is given in (3), where the subordinating and the coordinating conjunctions have been italicised: (3)

Puis, une dame a raconté au policier qu’il avait fait erreur et un peu plus tard Charles et la fille se sont rencontré dans la camionnette ... parce que entretemps le bonhomme avait déjà fumé une cigare et mangé deux plats du jour sans rien payer. (FR L2) ‘Then, a lady has told the policeman that he had made a mistake and a bit later Charles and the girl met in the van… because in the meantime the

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young chap had already smoked a cigar and eaten two meals without paying for anything. Such cases of “double linking” were taken into account in our analysis, and so two types of linking were quantified. The results are shown in Tables 5 and 6. Table 5. Types of linking in complex sentences Parataxis - juxtaposition - coordination total Hypotaxis - subordination - sec. predication total

FR L1

FR L2

NL L1

NL L2

13% 44% 57%

11% 38% 49%

2% 50% 52%

2% 44% 46%

38% 5% 43%

51% 0% 51%

48% 0% 48%

54% 0% 54%

Table 6. Types of linking in multiple sentences Parataxis - juxtaposition - coordination total Hypotaxis - subordination - sec. predication total

FR L1

FR L2

NL L1

NL L2

21% 35% 56%

21% 40% 61%

12% 48% 60%

13.7% 47% 60.7%

36% 8% 44%

39% 0% 39%

39% 1% 40%

39% 0.3% 39.3%

Native speakers In the French native speaker corpus (FR L1), coordination is the prevalent type of linking in complex sentences, while subordination is by one percent the most frequent linking type in multiple clauses. Juxtaposition is the least common type of paratactic linking in both kinds of sentences, but it plays a more important role in multiple sentences. The proportions of parataxis and hypotaxis are similar in complex and multiple sentences. In the Dutch native speaker corpus (NL L1), coordination is the most common type of linking in both complex and multiple sentences. However, in complex sentences it is very closely followed in popularity by the use of subordination. Juxtaposition is very seldom used in complex sentences, but it plays a larger role in multiple sentences. Overall we can conclude that, for complex sentences, the findings do not really correspond to the picture that has been given of Dutch in earlier studies (which do not distinguish complex and multiple sentences): hypotaxis is well represented, and indeed is even more

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frequent than in the FR L1 corpus. In multiple sentences, however, the results seem to conform better to the traditional picture: there is a gap of 20% between the use of parataxis (juxtaposition 12% and coordination 48%) on the one hand, and hypotaxis on the other (subordination 39% and secondary predication 1%), whereas this gap is only 12% in the FR L1 corpus. Within the paratactic organisation, coordination plays the leading part in the NL L1 corpus.18 Overall, we cannot conclude that French is characterised by much more subordinate linking than Dutch, or Dutch by much more juxtaposition. Our data do not really support sub-hypothesis 2. The most important difference is in secondary predication, which reaches 5% in complex sentences and 8% in multiple sentences in the FR L1 corpus (see examples [4a] and [4b] below), whereas in the NL L1 corpus, there were no examples of secondary predication in complex sentences and very few in multiple sentences (see example [4c]). (4a)

(4b)

(4c)

Voyant le désarroi de la jeune fille, Charlie Chaplin se dénonce à sa place pour le vol et se fait donc arrêter par les agents de police. (FR L1) ‘Seeing the young girl’s desperation, Charlie Chaplin turns himself in for the theft in her place, and gets himself arrested by the policemen.’ C’est alors que monsieur Chaplin, touché sans doute par la jolie frimousse et la mauvaise position de la jeune fille, s’accuse du vol. (FR L1) ‘It was then that Mr Chaplin, touched, without a doubt, by the pretty face of the girl and the awkward position she was in, said that he was guilty of the theft.’ Charlie Chaplin, overtuigd van het feit dat hij die vrouw wil helpen, stapt een cafetaria binnen, vult twee schotels eten en eet dit alles smakelijk op. (NL L1) ‘Charlie Chaplin, convinced that he wants to help this woman, goes into a cafeteria, fills two dishes with food and eats it all up with great pleasure.’

The specific use of present participial clauses in the FR L1 corpus (see example [4a]) cannot be seen entirely separately from an apparent difference between French and Dutch, which will be further commented on in Sections 5.2.3 and 5.3 below. In principle, the present participle can function as a predicate in Dutch, as illustrated by the following examples taken from the E-ANS (Coppen et al. 2004: “Het tegenwoordig deelwoord”, 2.4.5): (5) (6)

Hij komt lopend. ‘He comes walking (= He comes on foot).’ Karel liep lachend weg. ‘Charles walked away, smiling.’

No indications are given in the E-ANS about the frequency of this construction in modern Dutch. However, our data suggest that these forms are not often used, since there were only six occurrences of participial clauses in our data (see example [4c]), none of which contained a present participle.19

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Learners Let us now take a look at the interlanguages. We will first discuss the use of each type of clause-linking separately, by comparing their presence in complex and multiple sentences. Surprisingly, both learner corpora are characterised by high proportions of hypotaxis, consisting mainly of subordination. The learners’ complex sentences contain even more subordination than the Dutch nativespeakers’. In fact, subordination is the most common type of clause-linking used by learners in complex sentences. In multiple sentences, both learner groups use as many subordinate links as the Dutch native speakers. Subordination is no longer the preferred linking device, but it is still used almost as often as coordination in the FR L2 corpus. Coordination is the second most common type of clause-linking used by learners in complex sentences, and the most frequent one in multiple sentences. In complex sentences, the use of juxtaposition is very restricted in the NL L2 corpus (2%), but is more common in the FR L2 corpus (11%). Juxtaposition plays a more important role in multiple sentences in both learner corpora, but the learners of French use this linking device considerably more often than the learners of Dutch (21% in FL L2 and 14% in NL L2). Looking at these data from a different angle, and comparing the relative weight of parataxis and hypotaxis, we observe that the pattern in complex clauses is quite different from that of native speakers. Hypotaxis is used slightly more often than parataxis, although in multiple sentences, parataxis wins out over hypotaxis. But since subordination reaches 39% even in multiple sentences, it cannot be claimed that the interlanguage of our (pre-)advanced learners shows signs of “prototypical treatment”, i.e. of a more simplified, chronological and incremental organisation. Learners vs. natives Finally, we want to compare the data for interlanguages and native speakers. Overall, both interlanguages resemble their target languages more closely than their source languages. The most striking observation concerns the percentage of juxtaposed links in the FR L2 corpus: there are 9% more juxtaposed clauses in this corpus than in the NL L1 corpus, and only 2% less than in the FR L1 corpus. It seems as though the learners have succeeded in the process of acquiring the structuring of their target language with regard to juxtaposition. On the other hand, the Dutch-speaking learners of French (FR L2) do not make any use of secondary predication involving participial clauses, although this is quite characteristic of French L1 (cf. the examples in [4]). The French-speaking learners of Dutch (NL L2), however, seem to have understood the importance of coordination and subordination in their target language and often use it. These differences between the two learner groups might be explained by the nature of the properties they need to acquire: it is easier to use structures for which an analogous organisation pattern exists in the source language, than to use structures for which the equivalent in the source language seems to be rare and

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perhaps slightly archaic (secondary predication involving present participial clauses in Dutch). Summary All things considered, subordination is relatively frequent in our Dutch corpus, but coordination is the most frequently-used linking device. The French native speakers often employ juxtaposition and secondary predication; more specifically, they combine a participial clause with a main clause. Overall, the learners seem to be well on their way to producing the characteristics of their respective target languages, but the Dutch-speaking learners still need to grasp the particular properties of the French hypotactic pattern. Surprisingly, both learner groups use at least as many subordinating links as the native speakers. This finding, however, would need support from a more qualitative analysis (see Section 5.3 below). Future research should also check whether there is a connection between this and the overuse of causal subordinate clauses documented by Carroll & Lambert (2003), Chini (2003) and Kirchmeyer (2003). 5.2.3 The degree of integration Even though our French and Dutch data do not differ greatly with respect to the degree of packaging (Section 5.2.1), they might well differ with respect to the degree of integration. As was stated in Section 3.3, not all hypotactic structures that are characterised by a dependency relation present the same degree of integration: secondary predication is less well-integrated with the main predication than finite or infinitival subordinate clauses. With respect to the latter two types of subordinate clauses, it has been shown (Lehmann 1988, Bartning & Kirchmeyer 2003) that infinitival clauses manifest a higher degree of integration than finite subordinate clauses. The degree of integration of hypotactic structures will therefore be evaluated by distinguishing between finite subordinate clauses, infinitival subordinate clauses, participials and gerunds. Following Wilmet (1997: 530-531), we do not consider gerunds as part of secondary predication. It should be noted that Dutch does not really possess gerunds, but the use of the present participle preceded by the word al can be compared to the French “gérondif”: (7)

(Al) zwemmend bereikte hij de overkant. En nageant, il est arrivé à l’autre côté. ‘Ø Swimming he reached the other side.’

No examples of this form were found in either the NL L1 or the NL L2 corpora. Table 7 shows how finite and non-finite subordinate clauses were represented in the corpora.

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Table 7. Hypotaxis and integration Degree of integration sec. predication (participial clauses) finite sub. clauses non-finite sub. clauses infinitives gerunds sub-total

FR L1 19% 48%

FR L2 0% 71%

NL L1 2% 78%

NL L2 0.5% 73.5%

29% 4%

23% 6%

20% 0%

26% 0%

33%

29%

20%

26%

Native speakers The use of non-finite subordinate clauses was clearly more widespread among the French (33%) than the Dutch (20%) speakers, which seems to support subhypothesis 3. A substantial number of the FR L1 subordinate clauses are secondary predication participial clauses (see Table 7), which actually indicates a lower degree of integration. The non-finite clauses in the NL L1 corpus are mainly infinitival clauses. In the FR L1 corpus, the percentage of infinitival clauses is 9% higher than in the NL L1 corpus. This finding is again consistent with the idea that French has a more integrated discourse organisation than Dutch. Learners Both learner groups used more non-finite subordinate clauses than the Dutch native speakers. The French-speaking learners of Dutch (NL L2) seem to have acquired the use of integrated structures in their target language, since their nonfinite clauses were, with one exception, all infinitival clauses, as was the case for the target language corpus. Unlike the French native speakers (FR L1), the FR L2 group does not use participial clauses. The following examples illustrate that differences between the normal discourse organisation of Dutch and French have an impact on the interlanguage of the Dutch-speaking learners of French (FR L2). Example (8) shows how these learners prefer to use their native-language devices, while example (9) illustrates the French strategy: (8)

(9)

La dame qui a vu la jeune fille voler du pain informe le boulanger qui alerte la police. (FR L2) ‘The lady who saw the young girl steal a loaf of bread informs the baker, who alerts the police.’ Le boulanger, averti entre-temps par un témoin à l’œil vigilant, se précipite à la suite de la voleuse infortunée et la rejoint sans effort. (FR L1) ‘The baker, alerted in the meantime by a vigilant eye-witness, hurries to pursue the unfortunate thief and catches up with her easily.’

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Summary In addition to the use of subordinate clauses – which can be seen as a first indication of a more integrated discourse organisation – the frequency of finite and non-finite clauses has been suggested as a criterion for measuring the level of integration. At first sight the French native speakers’ narratives do seem to be characterised by a higher level of integration, because the percentage of non-finite clauses is clearly higher in the FR L1 corpus than in the other data sets (cf. Table 7: 33%). On the other hand, 19% of the subordinate clauses are detached participial clauses which function as secondary predications. They are, as such, even less integrated than the finite subordinate clauses. Given the contradictory evidence of the high percentage of extremely integrated structures in the FR L1 corpus (33%), and the frequent use of the least integrated dependent clauses (namely secondary predication, which is rare in NL L1 corpus), there is no clear answer with regard to our third sub-hypothesis. 5.3

Zooming in on subordinate clauses

Table 8 shows the types of subordinate clause used in the four corpora. Table 8. Types of subordinate clause Complement Adverbial Relative Gerund Participial

FR L1 16% 31% 30% 4% 19%

FR L2 26% 32% 37% 6% 0%

NL L1 25% 35% 38% 0% 2%

NL L2 35% 35% 29% 0% 1%

Native speakers The Dutch native speaker corpus contains 8% more relative clauses than the French native speaker corpus (38% compared to 30%). A similar difference can be observed for the number of complement clauses in the two native speaker data sets: the Dutch-speaking subjects (NL L1) use 9% more complement clauses than the French-speaking subjects (FR L1). With adverbial clauses, there is only a difference of 4% between the two groups. The subordinate clauses used by the French native speakers also include 4% gerunds and 19% present participles, two structures which are essentially absent from the Dutch native speakers’ writings. Learners The types of subordinate clauses used in the interlanguages are similar to the learners’ mother tongue with respect to relative clauses, whereas the proportions of adverbial clauses resemble the target languages more closely. The FR L2 group uses almost the same proportion of complement clauses (26%) as the NL L1 group (25%). The NL L2 group uses an even higher proportion (35%) of complement clauses. Together with adverbial clauses, complement clauses are the

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most frequent subordinate clauses in this learner corpus. There are almost 20% more complement clauses in the NL L2 group than in the French native speaker corpus (FR L1). Despite their reluctance to use present participles, the learners of French (FR L2) do use gerunds – in fact they make more use of this structure than French native speakers (FR L1). This indicates that they have acquired an important form-function relation that is used by native speakers. The structure is not unknown to the learners, since their mother tongue possesses a close variant of the French gerund (al + present participle), but this variant is seldom used in Dutch (see Section 5.2.3). We can conclude that the French interlanguage (FR L2) looks a lot like native Dutch in terms of the use of different types of subordinate clauses. The main difference between them is the presence of gerunds in the learner corpus. The Dutch interlanguage (NL L2) is striking for its high percentage of complement clauses, whereas the French native speaker (FR L1) corpus is marked by a small proportion of complement clauses. Lambert (1997) has pointed out that the use of complement clauses following verbs like want, believe, hope or desire can serve to make the characters’ intentions, hopes and beliefs explicit, and explain the reasons for some of their actions. It could thus be that a considerable proportion of the complement clauses in the learner corpus fulfil this function, and relate to the strong presence of logical relations in the French native speaker corpus. However, an analysis of these complement clauses showed that they mostly occur with declarative verbs (say, ask, convince, etc) and perception verbs (see, observe). The same types of verbs are used in the NL L1 (Dutch native speakers) corpus. 6.

Conclusion

6.1

Just how “vertical” is French and how “horizontal” is Dutch?

Our study gives a highly nuanced picture of the principles of discourse organisation in French and Dutch narratives and shows that there are no straightforward answers to the question of how vertical French is and how horizontal Dutch is. While there are no great differences between them in terms of the average number of words and clauses per sentence, and only small differences with respect to the use of simple, complex and multiple sentences, Dutch native speakers do seem to prefer more complex sentences, whereas French native speakers opt for slightly more multiple sentences than complex ones. Quite surprisingly, the two native corpora contain similar proportions of subordinate clauses. However, the French native speakers’ data have a higher proportion of non-finite clauses than the Dutch data. As far as clause-linking is concerned, no clear-cut patterns appear. The Dutch data are relatively paratactic and display a fair amount of coordination. However, they also contain a large number of subordinate links, although not a lot of juxtaposition. In the French

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data, coordination prevails in complex sentences, and subordination in multiple sentences. Comparatively speaking, these data also contain quite a lot of juxtaposition and secondary predication. Overall, it is not so much the degree of packaging nor the use of subordinate clauses that distinguishes French and Dutch in this study, but the frequency of non-finite clauses and more specifically the use of secondary predication in the form of present participles separated from the main clause by a comma. 6.2

Indications of transfer and interlanguage features

The learners’ narratives are considerably shorter than those of native speakers. The FR L2 learners also put more emphasis on the girl in the story than the other subjects do, but they are unable to give as much detail in the later part of their accounts as they do at the beginning. These findings suggest some difficulties at the planning level and with respect to the cognitive treatment of information, as may still be expected at a lower advanced level (see Bartning & Kirchmeyer 2003). On average the sentences written by the learners do not contain many fewer words or clauses than those written by native speakers. Proportionally, the learner corpora display more simple sentences, but nevertheless they frequently contain complex and multiple sentences. Our data do thus not fully corroborate Bartning & Kirchmeyer’s (2003) findings, where learners produced only a small number of multiple sentences, and showed a clear preference for simple sentences. The differences could be due to the different composition of the learner groups, since Bartning & Kirchmeyer’s group contained not only lower advanced-level but also intermediate learners. The overall proportion of subordinate clauses in the learner data does not differ from that in the native data. No transfer-related phenomena are observed in this respect, since there are no important differences between the two native datasets. Our French-speaking learners of Dutch thus do not display the same tendency as Lambert et al.’s (2003) French-speaking learners of English, who use many more subordinate clauses than native speakers of English (in line with the custom in their native language). Moreover, our Dutch-speaking learners of French (FR L2) juxtapose clauses more often than the native speakers of Dutch (NL L1), as do the native speakers of French (FR L1). The FR L2 learners have not yet acquired the specific organisation principle of French that consists of secondary predication through the linking of participial clauses to main clauses with a comma. However they do use gerunds. The NL L2 corpus, in turn, is characterised by a high percentage of complement clauses, as compared to both the target and (especially) the source language, a phenomenon which has yet to be explained. It thus seems that there is no clear organisational pattern typical of interlanguage at a (lower) advanced level. No real prototypical treatment consisting of a simplification of the task for reasons to do with cognitive cost is visible in our data. In this respect, our results differ from those of Lambert et al.

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(2003). The impact of target and source language in our data differs according to the feature being examined. 6.3

Some methodological implications for future research

We would like to conclude by formulating some remarks concerning the use of the integrated approach. However promising for the future, it should be pointed out that the integrated contrastive model can only function properly when all the data being compared are of a similar nature. We cannot help but wonder if the particular kind of data used in this project can be expected to present the same characteristics as the original and translated data used by Cosme (2008) and by the authors she refers to. Even though we have worked with native speakers who are probably as highly educated as the professional writers involved in the corpora used by others, and even though the majority of them have a “language profile”, their writing is likely to differ from that of trained professionals. Moreover, the specific character of narrative writing sets it somewhat apart from the novels, newspaper articles or editorials and parliamentary texts that make up the corpora used by Cosme (2006, 2008) and the authors she refers to. This means that the comparison of our findings with those obtained within the CAframework cannot be conclusive. It also shows that the preference for languagespecific organisation principles should be tested over a range of different text types and genres. We therefore think that it is necessary to continue compiling representative and diversified corpora of all kinds (different source and target languages, different translated languages, different interlanguages), as well as to stimulate the methodological debate about the ways in which this should happen and about the actual contrastive analyses. In addition, our contribution illustrates the need for a clear terminology and well-defined concepts in the study of discourse organisation in order to increase knowledge in this field. Not only has the comparison of our results with those obtained by others proved to be difficult at times, but the diverging results in other CIA-studies (for instance those on the use of subordinate clauses in German reported by Chini [2003] and Lambert et al. [2003]) are probably related to different conceptions of a particular phenomenon. The differences between Chini’s (2003) findings and Lambert et al.’s (2003), for instance, are more likely to be due to a different conception of subordination than to a problem of text-type comparability, since the two studies are based on comparable oral narratives.20 Notes 1

The existence of learner corpora of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) type has favoured comparisons of the interlanguage of learners who have different native languages, but who are acquiring the same foreign language. See Section 2.2.2 for examples.

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2

Cosme refers to the work carried out by Vanderauwera (1985), Chuquet & Paillard (1987) and Hannay & Mackenzie (1996). See also her own study (Cosme 2006) for a comparison of French and English.

3

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Christelle Cosme for having provided us with this manuscript.

4

The term “subordination” under the heading “degree of integration” refers to the use of finite subordinate clauses, and therefore does not include infinitival and participial clauses.

5

This movie has been used in various parts of the European Science Foundation (ESF) project (Perdue 1993) and the Structure of Learner Varieties (SLV) project (Hendriks 2005). We employed one of its episodes in our own study.

6

Remember that Lambert et al. (2003) only observed 11.2% of subordinate clauses in the narratives of their German native speakers. The difference between their findings and Chini’s (2003) is puzzling.

7

We are thinking here of all kinds of zero pronouns and ellipses.

8

We use the term “gerund” to refer to the verb form called a “gérondif” in French. It is an invariable form consisting of the verb stem and the ending –ant, identical to the present participle except that it is preceded by the preposition en. When used in sentence-initial position, both the “gérondif” and the present participle have the same subject as the main verb in normative grammar. According to Riegel et al. (1994: 342), they also share the same temporal value: they express simultaneity with respect to the main verb. Syntactically speaking, the “gérondif” resembles an adverbial expression as it takes the role of an adverbial complement expressing simultaneity and sometimes also causality, condition or opposition.

9

Combettes (1998, quoted in Rossi-Gensane 2006) describes detached constructions as “une série d’expressions, différentes d’un point de vue formel (adjectifs, participes, [syntagmes] introduits par une préposition, constructions absolues), mais qui présentent des propriétés communes dont les principales sont : la liberté de position dans la phrase […], la valeur d’un prédicat secondaire qui vient s’ajouter à la prédication principale, la présence d’un référent sous-jacent auquel la construction détachée doit renvoyer” (a series of different expressions (adjectives, participles, [phrases] introduced by a preposition, absolute constructions), which share properties such as: relatively free sentence position […], secondary predication added to the main predication, the presence of an implicit referent the detached construction refers to).

10

The rare cases of detached adjectives were not taken into consideration:

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Une jeune femme, l’air triste, marche dans la rue, le long d’un trottoir animé. (FR L1). ‘A young woman, sad, walks down the street, mingling in an animated crowd.’ 11

In Flanders, French is a compulsory subject in the last two years of primary school and throughout secondary school. In Wallonia, Dutch is not compulsory, as pupils can choose between Dutch, English and German. Therefore, not all the learners of Dutch will necessarily have taken Dutch courses for the same length of time.

12

This means that they were studying (Romance, Germanic, EasternEuropean, Eastern or African) languages.

13

We would like to thank Michel Berré and Carola Henn (Mons), AnneRosine Delbart (ULB) and Liesbeth Degand (UCL) for their help with the collection of the data and for welcoming us into their classrooms.

14

A closer look at the data reveals that some students showed very high frequencies of the elements studied and others very low frequencies. These neutralised each other to a considerable extent. To conduct research on the individual writing style of subjects (cf. Chini 2003), it would be necessary to also consider the learners as native speakers and compare their writings in their mother tongue to their narratives in their L2. This approach has one major drawback, however, which we judged to be possibly disruptive for our study: the subjects would have to see the movie, and perform the writing task, twice. After the second viewing they would be more familiar with the plot, which could influence their selection and planning process, and consequently the complexity of their writing.

15

The degree of complexity can be linked to the amount of detail presented by the visual stimuli and by the simultaneous involvement of many characters in the events.

16

The Dutch-speaking learners of French (FR L2) refer more frequently to the girl than do the other subjects. References to the girl constitute 34% of their references to all five characters, whereas they only make up 27% of the references in the FR L1 corpus, 26% in the NL L1 corpus and 27% in the NL L2 corpus.

17

Bearing in mind Chini’s (2003) observation that an insufficient mastery of referential devices (i.e. an overuse of full NPs and an underuse of pronouns) can lead to a more local treatment of information, which in turn results in a more paratactic discourse organisation, we also conducted a preliminary study on the types of referential devices used. We can conclude from this that, although the data diverge in some specific respects, there was no major overuse of explicit referential expressions

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Annemie Demol and Pascale Hadermann (suggesting difficulties in the global treatment of information, see also Hendriks 2001) in the learner corpora.

18

The rather small proportion of juxtaposition suggests that Dutch is not really characterised by a choppy style.

19

The Dutch translation of example (2d), repeated below for convenience, seems a little formal and perhaps even slightly archaic. The juxtaposition of independent clauses would come across as more vivid and fast-paced in modern Dutch. Laissant vides chacun des plats sur la table, il se dirige vers la sortie où le récupère le gendarme. (FR L1) ‘Leaving every one of the dishes on the table empty, he goes to the exit where the policeman catches him again.’ ‘Elke schotel leeg achterlatend op de tafel, begeeft hij zich naar de uitgang waar de politieman hem opwacht.’

20

It should be noted, however, that these data were obtained with the help of different visual stimuli.

References Asher, N. and L. Vieu (2005), ‘Subordinating and coordinating discourse relations’, Lingua, 115: 591-610. Bartning, I. (1997), ‘L’apprenant dit avancé et son acquisition d’une langue étrangère. Tour d’horizon et esquisse d’une caractérisation de la variété avancée’, Aile, 9: 9-50. Bartning, I. and N. Kirchmeyer (2003), ‘Le développement de la compétence textuelle à travers les stades acquisitionnels en français L2’, Aile, 19: 9-39. Carroll, M. and M. Lambert (2003), ‘Information structure in narratives and the role of grammaticised knowledge: A study of adult French and German learners of English’, in: C. Dimroth and M. Starren (eds) Dynamics of First and Second Language Acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 267-287. Chini, M. (2003), ‘Le phénomène de la jonction interpropositionnelle dans la narration en italien L2 : entre agrégation et intégration’, Aile, 19: 71-106. Chuquet, H. and M. Paillard (1987), Approche linguistique des problèmes de traduction anglais > < français. Paris & Gap: Ophrys. Coppen, P.A., W. Haeseryn, and F. de Vriend (2004), E-ANS (1.1). Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen. Available online at www.ru.nl/e-ans/content/eans/index.php3 (last accessed on November 28, 2006). Cosme, C. (2005), ‘A corpus-based view on information packaging across languages’. Paper presented at the SPRIK seminar, 10 November 2005,

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University of Oslo, Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages. Cosme, C. (2006), ‘Clause-combining across languages: a corpus-based study of English-French translation shifts’, Languages in Contrast, 6(1): 71-108. Cosme, C. (2008), ‘A corpus-based perspective on clause-linking patterns in English, French and Dutch’, in: C. Fabricius-Hansen and W. Ramm (eds) ‘Subordination’ vs. ‘Coordination’ in Sentence and Text from a Crosslinguistic Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 89-114. Fabricius-Hansen, C. (1996), ‘Informational density: A problem for translation and translation theory’, Information Structure: A Key Concept for Translation Theory, Special issue of Linguistics, 34(3): 521-565. Fabricius-Hansen, C. (1999), ‘Information packaging and translation: Aspects of translational sentence splitting (German – English/Norwegian)’, in: M. Doherty (ed.) Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. 175-214. Gilquin, G. (2000/2001), ‘The Integrated Contrastive Model. Spicing up your data’, Languages in Contrast, 3(1): 95-123. Granger, S. (1996), ‘From CA to CIA and back: an integrated approach to computerized bilingual and learner corpora’, in: K. Aijmer, B. Altenberg and M. Johansson (eds) Languages in Contrast. Papers from a Symposium on Text-based Cross-linguistic Studies. Lund 4-5 March 1994. Lund: Lund University Press. 37-51. Hannay, M. and J. L. Mackenzie (eds) (1996), Effective Writing in English: A Resource Guide. Groningen: Martinus Nijhoff. Hendriks, H. (2001), ‘Using nouns for reference maintenance: a seeming contradiction in L2 discourse’, in: A.G. Ramat (ed.) Typology and Second Language Acquisition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 291-326. Hendriks, H. (ed.) (2005), The Structure of Learner Varieties. Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter. Kirchmeyer, N. (2003), Etude de la compétence textuelle des lectes d’apprenants avancés. Aspects structurels, fonctionnels et informationnels. PhD dissertation, University of Stockholm, Cahiers de la recherche 17. Lambert, M. (1997), ‘En route vers le bilinguisme’, Aile, 9: 147-172. Lambert, M., M. Carroll and C. von Stutterheim (2003), ‘La subordination dans les récits d’apprenants avancés francophones et germanophones de l’anglais’, Aile, 19: 41-69. Lehmann, C. (1988), ‘Towards a typology of clause linkage’, in: J. Haiman and S.A. Thompson (eds) Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam & New York: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 181-225. Perdue, C. (ed.) (1993), Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-linguistic Perspectives. 2 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riegel, M., J.-C. Pellat and R. Rioul (1994), Grammaire méthodique du français. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

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Rossi-Gensane, N. (2006), ‘À propos des constructions détachées en rupture comportant une forme verbale non finie, et plus particulièrement des participes’, Travaux linguistiques du Cerlico, 19: 131-146. Vanderauwera, R. (1985), Dutch Novels Translated into English: The Transformation of a “Minority” Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Watorek, M. (1996), ‘Le traitement prototypique : définition et implications’, Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen, 55: 187-200. Wilmet, M. (1997), Grammaire critique du français. Louvain-la-Neuve: Duculot.

Involvement features in writing: do time and interaction trump register awareness? Annelie Ädel English Language Institute University of Michigan Abstract Speaking is typically characterised by linguistic markers of involvement, and writing by detachment, as noted by Chafe (1982). However, differences between speech and writing should not be understood as a dichotomy, but rather as a continuum along which texts, whether spoken or written, vary. Sometimes the degree of “writtenness” or “spokenness” varies inappropriately – a phenomenon often witnessed in foreign language learning. Research on the SWICLE, the Swedish subcorpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), has shown that learners tend to produce an overly involved style, the stated reason being poor awareness of register (Altenberg 1997). However, through intercorpus comparison, it was found that, instead, this is primarily due to task setting (time available) and intertextuality (access to secondary sources). The findings are connected to previous observations that time available and possibilities for interaction profoundly influence linguistic output (Chafe 1986). Involvement markers were examined in the timed and untimed sections of the SWICLE and in the Uppsala Student Essay (USE) corpus of untimed English essays by Swedish speakers with access to secondary sources. Thus, the examined corpora differed precisely in task setting and intertextuality. This three-way comparison showed that the learners exhibit more involvement in timed than in untimed essays, but less if they have access to other texts. The paper closes by addressing the important question of corpus comparability and by making recommendations for testing practices in language teaching.

1.

Introduction

One of the classic topics in linguistics concerns the difference between spoken and written language. Linguists such as Chafe (1982), Halliday (1985) and Biber (1986, 1988) have studied specific grammatical features that mark a stretch of connected language as speech or writing, considered from the point of view of the general communicative and situational conditions that affect speech and writing. Biber (1988) compares speech and writing in terms of involved versus informational production, situation-dependent versus elaborated reference, and non-abstract versus abstract style, while Halliday (1985) “contrasts the prosodic features and grammatical intricacy of speech with the high lexical density and grammatical metaphor of writing” (Roberts & Street 1997: 168). Of special interest here is the work of Chafe (1982), Chafe & Danielewicz (1987) and Tannen (1982), describing speech and writing as differing in terms of involvement and detachment. According to these researchers, informal speaking is typically

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characterised by linguistic markers of involvement, such as first person reference and emphatic particles, and formal writing by markers of detachment, such as passive constructions and abstract subjects. Speakers, according to Chafe (1982: 45), typically exhibit involvement with their audience because they tend to have face-to-face contact. This results in shared knowledge about the environment of the conversation; the speaker being able to monitor effects of the discourse and the listener being able to signal understanding or request clarification; and the speaker being concerned with experiential richness rather than consistency or comprehensibility at a different time and in a different place. Writers, on the other hand, typically have a fundamentally different relation to their physically absent audiences, which, according to Chafe, leads to different linguistic effects: primarily, an increased use of detachment features. This is not to say that differences between speech and writing should be understood as a dichotomy; they should rather be conceived of as a continuum along which texts, whether spoken or written, vary. Consider, for example, the place on the continuum of a patent text versus that of an electronic chat, although these are both written forms. Similarly, consider the place on the continuum of a face-to-face conversation between friends versus that of an academic lecture. Instead of portraying speech and writing as static systems encoded by different media, Chafe draws attention to the influence of contextual factors, such as shared time and space, in all language production. Table 1 gives a short and non-exhaustive list of some typical types and features of involvement. It is taken from Altenberg (1997), but is ultimately based on Chafe (1982). Table 1. Types and features of involvement (examples from the SWICLE) 1st pers sg pronouns Disjuncts Questions Exclamations Discourse markers

I, me, my, mine frankly, obviously, of course, naturally, perhaps, maybe, unfortunately e.g. Does this all sound utopian to you?; And that is not what we want, is it? e.g. Terrible, I know!; Look at society!; But let’s hope for peace in Europe! well, you see

Involvement features can be described as ways in which speakers/writers show involvement with their audience. First person singular pronouns mark the presence of the speaker/writer and explicitly show that she is the agent behind the discourse.1 Questions tend to be explicitly audience-oriented and generally contribute to making a discourse more interactive. Exclamations can be divided into addressee-oriented directives, primarily used to instruct someone to do something, and addresser-oriented expressive exclamations, primarily used for

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expressing the extent to which she is impressed by something (see Biber et al. 1999: 202). The list of disjuncts includes hedges (perhaps, maybe), emphatic markers (obviously, naturally, of course) and opinion markers (frankly, unfortunately), displaying the speaker/writer’s degree of certainty, and her attitude and stance taken towards what is said. The short list of discourse markers (well, you see) includes expressions that are very frequent in conversation. This paper will summarise a study of these involvement features in written texts. My immediate reason for choosing these particular parameters to measure stylistic variation is that they have been used in previous research (Altenberg 1997), on which the present work builds. 2.

Communicative competence in a foreign language

Speakers and writers learn how to manage features of involvement and detachment as part of their communicative competence, which includes knowledge of style and genre variation.2 Features of involvement are learnt first, while features of detachment are adopted at a later stage. Language users typically do not learn to produce features of detachment in any great numbers or in a systematic way until they develop school-level literacy. In actual language use, the degree of “writtenness” or “spokenness” sometimes varies inappropriately; this phenomenon is often witnessed in the context of foreign language (FL) and second language writing. Many studies have shown that learner writing tends to exhibit high frequencies of linguistic features that are more characteristic of the spoken language rather than the written language of native speakers (e.g. Altenberg 1997, Granger & Rayson 1998, Petch-Tyson 1998, Hinkel 2003). In the following, I will focus on the use of involvement features in FL writing, because the question of how learners manage this variation is an important one, seeing as how this can be a challenge even to native speakers, especially during the development of academic literacy. It hardly needs to be pointed out that inability to vary one’s language use according to context is likely to result in considerable difficulties in communication in all domains, not to mention low assessment scores in the educational domain. Managing linguistic variation is an especially burning issue in the case of formal writing. As pointed out by Howard (2004: 146), learners’ linguistic output is influenced by factors like type of classroom input and authentic target-language contact outside the classroom. However, the type of language to which students are exposed may vary widely along the formal-informal continuum, even in the classroom, depending on the pedagogical practices in use. For example, it has been argued that, in some countries, the pedagogical pendulum has swung too far toward the informal end in EFL instruction (English as a Foreign Language; Altenberg 1997). The type of learner in focus here is a relatively advanced university student of English. The difficulties encountered by such learners are likely to be

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mainly lexical and stylistic rather than grammatical (Granger 1993: 59). This study concentrates on argumentative writing by this learner group, since this is a highly important text type in many domains of society. The students are writing in English, one of the languages most widely used by non-native speakers. Although the material under consideration consists of written texts, the focus will be on the degree to which these texts exhibit features of involvement, which are characteristic of spoken language. Table 2 illustrates (1) a relatively successful positioning along the continuum of involvement versus detachment and (2) a less successful attempt. The examples come from two different collections of argumentative essays, and they both deal with the topic of abortion. Table 2. Successful versus less successful written examples by Swedish learners Successful attempt (1) Although the question of abortions cannot be regarded in just black or white, the reasons in favour of this issue clearly overweigh those against and the right to abortions should therefore be defended and supported. (USE 1097.b2)

Less successful attempt (2) Personally I think it is a woman’s right to have one, if she feels she can’t afford bringing it up or if she already has five children. However, I don’t think abortions […]. (SWICLE 339)

Let us begin with the less successful attempt, example (2), which is taken from an essay in the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE; Granger et al. 2002). It represents a style typical of advanced learners of English whose first language is Swedish. 3.

The Swedish subcorpus of the ICLE

Since many of the other chapters of this volume describe the ICLE in some detail, it will be treated rather cursorily here. However, one fact about the corpus that needs to be emphasised is that, since the ICLE writers are all learners of English at an advanced level, the focus of research is primarily on overuse and underuse of linguistic phenomena as compared to equivalent native-speaker production, rather than on grammatical errors. The ICLE material makes it possible to pinpoint which linguistic features are used considerably more or less by learners than by native speakers.3 The general idea is that “[w]hen matched with comparable native-speaker texts, a learner language corpus provides the basis for revealing the characteristics of learner language” (Johansson 1998: 7), such as interference from the mother tongue (L1) or possible universal features of learner language. The ICLE material includes several subcorpora of argumentative essay writing by university students from more than a dozen different L1 backgrounds. The focus of this chapter is on the Swedish subcorpus of the ICLE (the

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SWICLE), which consists of 350 argumentative essays with a total of 205,000 words. The essays are all full-length, with an average size of 560 words. The student writers were in their third or fourth year of university-level English studies at three different universities in Sweden. Although they tend to have relatively high proficiency levels in English, most students studying English at Swedish universities do not get much systematic training in argumentative or academic writing, nor have they had much input before entering university.4 More details on the SWICLE relevant to the present study will be given in Section 7 below. Next, we will look more closely at the high degree of involvement found in the SWICLE. 4.

The Swedish learner style

Previous research based on the SWICLE (Altenberg 1997, Petch-Tyson 1998) has shown that learner writers, instead of a detached, “writerly” style typical of argumentative text, as in (1) above, tend to produce an overly involved style, as in (2) above. This trend has been found to be quite persistent by comparison with native-speaker control corpora of argumentative texts.5 Examples (3) and (4), excerpts from the concluding sections of two SWICLE essays on different topics, serve to illustrate further the high degree of involvement of the learner style: (3)

(4)

The presentation I have made with science and the dreams of ours walking hand in hand on a very exciting road towards a “happy ever after” kind of story, does seem a bit glorifying, I admit. But my general opinion, in conclusion, is the same one as I introduced in this little essay: No, I do not agree with the statement that science dominate our world too much, so that there will be no space for dreaming - there is plenty of space! (SWICLE 075) I am in favour of a school which includes six-year-olds. The reason is that I think that most children are ready for it by then. Of course, I don’t think this early start should be too harsh but a playful and gentle period which creates space for the children to adapt to the new world they are entering. There, they must be stimulated to learn, taught how to show respect to other people and be treated with care. It may sound like an utopia but I am convinced that it could work given the right resources. Finally I would like to say that I believe that a lot of the social problems of today have to do with people’s childhood. Feeling safe and cared for as a child, creates better opportunities in life and the responsibility lies on us as parents or as a society. (SWICLE 334)

In these examples, the features listed in Table 1 have been underlined to give an idea of how they are used in the SWICLE.6 In (3), first person singular pronouns are used repeatedly, with four occurrences of I and one of my, and the excerpt

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ends with an exclamation. In (4), there are six occurrences of first person singular pronouns, and one occurrence of of course. Although the underlined parts do not tell the whole story as far as “spoken” style is concerned, they do show that the density of involvement features is considerable. Altenberg (1997: 123), in a paper investigating precisely the involvement features listed in Table 1 in a subset of the SWICLE material, as well as some detachment features represented by passives and abstract subjects, found that the Swedish learner style is “more typical of informal spoken registers than of argumentative writing”. This “spoken style” was manifest at all linguistic levels: lexis, grammar and discourse, leading him to conclude that the “common basic deficiency among the Swedish learners [is] a style of writing that is greatly influenced by spoken language” (ibid. 130). The reason for this is taken to be poor awareness of register, caused by inadequate teaching and over-exposure to informal, spoken registers. 5.

Reasons for over-involvement

Having studied the SWICLE material in great detail myself, I had come to the same conclusion about the exaggerated level of involvement features in the students’ writing. I had used SWICLE for research on metadiscourse, or selfreflective language (Ädel 2006), only to find that Swedish learners overused personal types of metadiscourse considerably more than impersonal types of metadiscourse – which also confirmed the personal and informal style of the SWICLE. In the course of the research, I attempted to list other possible reasons for this tendency, assuming that there could be other factors accounting for this trend among SWICLE writers, and that Altenberg’s poor-register-awareness explanation might not be telling the whole story. In addition to (a) register awareness, other relevant factors were suggested to be (b) cultural conventions, (c) general learner strategies and (d) genre comparability (Ädel 2006). Table 3 below distinguishes among and sums up the four factors. The first column names the factors, the second column gives a short-hand label for the main argument behind each factor, and the third column briefly explains the source of the problem. The groups mentioned in the explanation refer to (i) learner writers in the SWICLE and (ii) a native-speaker control group based on the university student writing in LOCNESS (see footnote 5). In the case of involvement, factor (a), register awareness, has been claimed to explain the divergence of advanced Swedish learner writing from nativespeaker writing. There are other possibilities, however, one of which is factor (b). The SWICLE writers’ overuse of involvement features may be influenced by writing conventions specific to Swedish. Informality in writing has been observed in many different areas in Swedish, in particular in public discourse, and several studies have shown that written Swedish has become more similar to spoken Swedish (e.g. Mårtensson 1988, Svensson 1993, Lagerholm 1999). Another way of explaining the differences along the learner versus native-speaker axis is to

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attribute them to “learner language”. Factor (c) refers to the existence of universal strategies employed by those writing in a foreign language that may still “shine through” despite differences in instruction, input and L1 transfer. Since the design of the present study provides no evidence for factors (b) or (c), these must remain unresolved for the time being. Instead, this study will focus on the possible influence of factor (d), genre comparability. The question to be answered is whether different conditions of writing for the texts collected in different corpora makes comparing the corpora fundamentally problematic. Table 3. Overview of four explanations for linguistic differences at the discourse level between learner and native-speaker corpora (based on Ädel 2006) Factor

Argument

Explanation

(a) Register awareness

“instructional”

(b) Cultural conventions

“typological”

(c) General learner strategies

“universal claim”

(d) Genre comparability

“apples & oranges”

Differences found between groups depend on background knowledge, primarily acquired through instruction, but also through general exposure. Differences found between groups are due to differing conventions in the L1 and the L2, which cause interference in L2 output. Differences found between groups arise because, when writing in a foreign language, writers employ universal strategies to cope. Differences found between groups are due to the corpora under comparison not being comparable, and can be explained by external factors like time given for planning or producing a text.

6.

Genre comparability

There are two specific phenomena subsumed by the concept of “genre comparability” that can be shown to play a role here. They will be referred to as task setting (or time available), meaning whether an essay was timed or untimed, and intertextuality, meaning whether the writer had access to secondary sources (in the form of newspaper or journal articles) to use as a starting point for her argumentation and to refer to in her own text. How might task setting and intertextuality have an impact on writing style? Linguists have observed that, in language production, the amount of time available and the possibilities for interaction profoundly influence the linguistic output (see e.g. Chafe 1986). In fact, one of the main differences between writing and speaking is that “a writer has much more time than a speaker to deliberate on

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what is being said” (Chafe 1986: 262). In other words, whether or not language producers have ample time to plan and edit their linguistic production makes a big difference. We have to assume, then, that even when writing, the amount of time one has available can make a difference to the output. Language production is also affected by interaction; indeed, this is a basic tenet of sociolinguistics. A spoken conversation typically involves direct participation on the part of two or more speakers. In written discourse, by contrast, there is no time or space shared by the writer and the reader. However, the availability of dialogue should not be seen as a yes-or-no proposition; although the written medium does not accommodate synchronous interaction, features typical of dialogue still occur in written text. In a dialogic written text such as a letter to a friend, the writer typically depicts forms of interaction between writer and reader, even though flesh-and-blood readers are not present at the time of writing to make concrete contributions to the discourse. Indeed, even in seemingly monologic texts, such as research articles, recent research has shown that a great deal of attention is paid to the audience. Academic writing is characterised as fundamentally interactive, for example by Hyland (2005: 11), who argues that “[m]anaging social relationships is crucial in writing because a text communicates effectively only when the writer has correctly assessed both the readers’ resources for interpreting it and their likely response to it”. Furthermore, when interaction is involved in language production, whom one interacts with will also affect the output. Even though there is no interactant directly present in the case of writing, the writer will still have a specific audience in mind, consisting of actual or imagined readers. In the production of a written text, the actual reader is never present to submit an utterance or reply directly, but the imagined reader will still affect the discourse and leave his mark. Bhatia (1993: 9) uses the term “hypothetical reader” for the notion that, in written discourse, the writer assumes a hypothetical reader for whom she is writing. She anticipates the reactions of this reader and adjusts her writing accordingly, in order to facilitate communication. A writer always has an imagined reader in mind, which may even be herself, as in the case of a personal diary. In addition to the imagined reader, another influence that typically affects a writer’s output is the presence of secondary source texts, such as an editorial or a journal article. When an essay writer uses secondary sources for her text, she will react to and relate to these and to the writer personae of those texts. That is, the writer is likely to accommodate to these sources of input and adapt to their style, leading to a more professional-sounding essay. Another way in which other texts can influence written production is through imitation: a writer who is exposed to model texts will have a better idea of what to aim for. I will support here the idea that a student’s writing style is likely to benefit from access to other texts in the same register.

Involvement features in writing 7.

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Inter-corpus comparison

Seeking to investigate whether these factors actually do have an effect on the overuse of involvement in Swedish learner writing, I was fortunate enough to locate another corpus that was fully comparable with the SWICLE, with the exception precisely of task setting and intertextuality. The other corpus is the Uppsala Student Essay corpus (USE; Axelsson 2000), a collection of essays by university students with L1 Swedish and advanced L2 English.7 For this study, I used a subset of the USE, a part that specifically consists of argumentative essays.8 Table 4 illustrates the main similarities and differences between the USE subset and the SWICLE. Table 4. Comparison between USE and SWICLE USE Home university of students Student level Topics Exam conditions Secondary sources

Uppsala University 2nd term students Set argumentative topics Untimed (2-3 week deadline, out of class) Access to written sources for facts

SWICLE Universities of Göteborg, Lund, Växjö 3rd and 4th term students Set argumentative topics Some timed sit-down exams, some untimed No input other than personal experience

Looking at the data from the point of view of Bhatia’s (1993: 23ff.) external criteria of genre, we can classify the included texts as belonging to the same genre. These criteria include temporal factors (time of composition and age of writers), sociological factors (educational background of writers), factors that depend on the writer and reader (intended audience, writer-reader relationship and goals of the writer), and comparability of topics.9 All essays were written within a span of about a decade, although the time of composition of the two corpora differs slightly (SWICLE from 1990-1999 and USE from 1999–2001). Although the USE students were somewhat less experienced, the range of student status is still relatively restricted: from second to fourth term students (i.e. a range of less than 1.5 years of study). The writers represented in the corpora were all full-time students in English departments at different (but comparable) Swedish universities. They all wrote on set argumentative topics, with the exception of a small group of SWICLE students who wrote on a literary or general cultural topic. Crucially, and fortunately for the present purposes, the main points of divergence are found precisely in access to secondary sources and in exam conditions. The USE writers were instructed to refer to editorials or newspaper articles dealing with topical issues (e.g. gay couples’ right to adopt children), and to present counter-arguments to views expressed in these sources. The sources

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were all in Swedish, which arguably made for a more demanding languageprocessing task than if they had used English-language sources. Since the SWICLE is a mixture of timed and untimed essays, it was split into two subcorpora on the basis of the timed vs. untimed criterion. These will be referred to as SWICLE Timed and SWICLE Untimed. In effect, this produced three different subcorpora involving argumentative essay writing in advanced L2 English by university students whose L1 is Swedish, enabling a three-way comparison. Table 5 summarises the sizes and the distinguishing features of the three corpora. Given the differences between the three subcorpora, we can expect them to display a stepwise pattern in the amount of involvement features they display, with SWICLE Timed having the most involvement features because the essays were written under strict time constraints, and with no access to other texts, followed by SWICLE Untimed, for which the time constraint is absent, and then with the USE having the fewest involvement features, because these essays were untimed and the writers had access to other texts. Table 5. Sizes and features of the three subcorpora

Untimed essay? Access to other sources? Number of essays Number of words 8.

SWICLE Timed NO NO 162 87,678

SWICLE Untimed YES NO 121 70,670

USE YES YES 57 50,342

Results

The same markers of involvement used by Altenberg (1997), listed in Table 1, were investigated in the three subcorpora. The frequencies of the different involvement features are shown in Table 6. Items marked with a dagger are not sufficiently frequent to be statistically meaningful. The statistical significance of the differences between the corpora is given in Table 7 below. If we consider first the first person singular pronouns, SWICLE Timed has almost a third more occurrences of I than either SWICLE Untimed or USE. Similarly, both me and my are considerably more frequent in SWICLE Timed than in SWICLE Untimed and USE. The totals for disjuncts, by contrast, show a different picture from the pronouns: although SWICLE Timed has the greatest frequency, there is a clear difference between SWICLE Untimed (at 22.35) and USE (at 13.51). Most of the frequencies for the individual words follow the general pattern, although there are exceptions (frankly, obviously and unfortunately). As with the disjuncts, we find a close match between the two SWICLE corpora with respect to both questions and exclamations, while the USE corpus has considerably lower frequencies. For the selected discourse markers, finally, we find very low overall numbers, suggesting that this is not a major problem area for Swedish learners.10

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Table 6. Frequencies of involvement features, normalised per 10,000 words

1st pers sg pron: I me my mine† Disjuncts: of course naturally perhaps maybe unfortunately obviously frankly† Questions Exclamations Discourse markers: well you see† Total

SWICLE Timed

SWICLE Untimed

USE

102.65 13.46 25.43 0.34

68.91 3.96 8.91 0.42

76.48 4.17 7.55 0

11.06 2.62 6.62 3.54 2.05 1.14 0 31.25 8.10

7.22 1.98 5.80 3.25 3.54 0.42 0.14 30.28 8.07

5.36 0.60 3.38 0.79 1.39 1.99 0 20.86 0

1.60 0.46 210.32

2.83 0.13 145.86

0.20 0 122.77

Let us next restrict the discussion to the totals for the four types of involvement features with the highest frequencies (that is, excluding the discourse markers), presented in Table 7 below. The arrows and grey highlighting indicate the differences between the corpora that are significant (p), as in (10), and subsequently move to <Spec, IP>.7 Thus, unergative Vs appear in initial structures (D[eep]-Structures) like (11a), while unaccusatives appear in initial structures like (11b). (10)

(11)

a. unergative ‘John spoke’

b. unaccusative ‘Three girls arrived’

(D-Structure)

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The syntactic distinction between the two classes of Vs is systematically related to a semantic distinction: roughly, unergatives typically denote activities controlled by an agent (speak in [11a] and also cry, cough, sweat, jump, run, dance, work, play, etc), while unaccusatives have themes (or patients) as their only argument (arrive in [11b] and also blossom, appear, exist, deteriorate, arrive, come, etc). In the course of the derivation, that is, in the mapping from D-Structure to S(urface) Structure, the NPs in (11) move to <Spec, IP> in order to satisfy their Case requirements (i.e. to be assigned nominative Case) and/or the requirement that <Spec, IP> in English must be occupied by an overt element (roughly, Chomsky’s [1981] Extended Projection Principle; see note 6), as in (12). (12)

a. [IP [NP Johni] [VP [NP ti] [V’ spoke]]]

Unergative

b. [IP [NP Three girlsi] [VP [V arrived] [NP ti]]]

Unaccusative

While this movement is obligatory for external arguments like John, as in (12a), the internal argument of an unaccusative V may, however, remain in its initial position under certain conditions, as in there-constructions like (13) and inversion constructions like (1), now reproduced as (14), with there and PP in <Spec, IP>, respectively. (13)

[IP [NP There] [VP [V arrived] [NP three girls]]]

(14)

[IP [PP in the outside pocket] [VP [V go] [NP his schedule book, chap stick, gum, contact lens solution and hair brush]]]

Characteristically, inversion constructions involve an opening XP adverbial in <Spec, IP>: typically a locative element as in (14) and (15a) below, which are examples of locative inversion, but also time adverbials, as in (15b), as well as other types like the with-PP in (15c).8 (15) a. On one long wall hung a row of Van Goghs. b. Then came the turning point of the match. c. With incorporation, and the increased size of the normal establishment came changes which revolutionized office administration. (corpus examples from Biber et al. 1999: 912-913) There is a considerable overlap between Vs appearing in thereconstructions and typical locative inversion structures like (14) and (15a). For both types of constructions there is the requirement that the V be unaccusative, but this is not by itself sufficient to characterise the class of Vs appearing in these

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structures.9 Two main semantic classes of unaccusative Vs have been distinguished in approaches which seek to characterise unaccusativity at the lexicon-syntax interface in order to establish a relation between the semantic properties of the predicate and the syntactic properties of the constructions they enter: (i) Vs of change of state and (ii) Vs of existence and appearance (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995). Only the latter are found in this construction. That is, together with be, we find Vs such as appear, arise, ascend, emerge, exist, come and so on, but not unaccusative Vs of change of state like those in (16): (16)

a. *There opened the door. b. *There broke a window.

(= The door opened) (= A window broke)

It was with these considerations in mind that the Vs for this study were carefully chosen (see Section 5.2 and Table 2). In contrast, as we have seen, null expletives in Spanish and Italian may be found wherever we have a postverbal S, regardless of whether V is unaccusative or unergative. Their occurrence is not determined by properties operating at the lexicon-syntax interface. Rather, Romance “free” inversion appears to be governed by features that operate at the syntax-discourse interface, at least in informationally non-neutral contexts. This could, in principle, lead to the expectation that Spanish and Italian learners of English may overgeneralise and produce postverbal subjects with all verb classes. However, we will see that there are reasons to predict that VS structures in the NNS of our learners are found with exactly the same subset of Vs as in English NS. This issue will be addressed in our discussion of previous L2 research below (Section 3). 2.2

2.2.1

Postverbal Ss in English and Spanish at the syntax-discourse interface: inversion as focalisation Inversion as focalisation

It has been argued recently that information structure notions, such as topic and focus, appear to play a crucial role in the position of S in free-order languages, with preverbal Ss usually analysed as topics or given information, and postverbal Ss as (presentational/informational) focus or new information (see, among others, Vallduví 1990, Fernández-Soriano 1993, Liceras et al. 1994, Picallo 1998, Zubizarreta 1998, 1999, Belletti 2001, 2004b, Domínguez 2004, Lozano 2006). The following question-answer pairs from Italian and Spanish clearly indicate that the postverbal S can be interpreted as (non-contrastive) focus, i.e. new information. When S is preverbal, it is interpreted as old information (topic), which explains why the (c) examples in (17) and (18) are pragmatically-odd (marked as #).10

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(17)

a. ¿Quién ha llegado/hablado? who has arrived/spoken? b. Ha llegado/hablado Juan. has arrived/spoken Juan c. #Juan ha llegado/hablado. Juan has arrived/spoken

Spanish

(18)

a. Chi è arrivato/ha parlato? who has arrived/spoken? b. É arrivato/Ha parlato Gianni. has arrived/spoken Gianni c. #Gianni è arrivato/ha parlato. Gianni has arrived/spoken

Italian

Additionally, Belletti (2004b) points out that in Italian, (18b) is also an appropriate answer to neutral, out-of-the-blue questions like (19), i.e. when the whole clause is new information, as opposed to the sentence with the preverbal S in (18c) (examples from Belletti 2004b: 22). (19)

Che cosa è sucesso? What has happened?

Empirical studies on Spanish native speakers’ acceptability preferences show, however, that verb choice may determine whether the answer to questions like (19) may contain either a preverbal or a postverbal S. In particular, preverbal Ss are favoured for unergative Vs and postverbal Ss in unaccusative contexts (Hertel 2003, Lozano 2003, 2006) (see also Pinto 1997 for similar observations for Italian), as in (20). (20)

a. i. Juan ha hablado. Juan has spoken b. i. #Juan ha llegado. Juan has arrived

ii. #Ha hablado Juan. has spoken Juan ii. Ha llegado Juan. has arrived Juan

Though this issue requires further analysis, it is largely irrelevant for the present study as our data is extracted from written pieces of work in which we are not likely to find neutral or out-of-the-blue contexts (even the initial sentence is contextualised by the title of the essay). Thus, independently of whether the preverbal S can also be focus or new information in Romance Null S languages, what is crucial for our purpose is that in these languages inversion serves the purpose of focalising the subject. Notice also that in languages like Italian, Spanish and English, new information in clause initial position can be interpreted as contrastive focus (see Rizzi 1997), as shown in (21) in capitals.

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a. IL TUO LIBRO ho comprato (non il suo). b. TU LIBRO he comprado (no el suyo). c. YOUR BOOK I have bought (not his).

From this, it follows that preverbal subjects are not necessarily topics or old information, but may also be analysed as contrastive focus. Non-contrastive (i.e. informational or presentational) focus, of the type we are looking at here, occurs postverbally (see also note 10). Let us now turn to English, which makes a much more restricted use of inversion mechanisms, as we have seen. Postverbal Ss in English thereconstructions and locative inversion structures are also often analysed as (presentational) focus (see, among others, Bolinger 1977, Rochemont 1986, Bresnan 1994). In Bresnan’s (1994) analysis of locative inversion, the referent of the postverbal NP is introduced, or reintroduced, on the scene referred to by the preverbal PP: for instance in (15a) on one long wall provides the scene onto which a row of Van Goghs is introduced, which is characterised as a new discourse entity. A different approach is adopted by Birner (1994, 1995), who has argued on the basis of a large corpus of naturally-occurring tokens that the discourse function of all inversion constructions is that of “linking relatively unfamiliar information to the prior context through the clause-initial placement of information that is relatively familiar in the discourse” (Birner 1995: 238). Thus in (14), in the outside pocket is relatively more familiar than the material in postverbal position, as in the preceding context the speaker has mentioned the different pockets in which things are placed (see [1] above). The felicity of an inversion depends on the notion of relative discourse-familiarity: the preverbal constituent may not present “newer” information in the discourse than the postverbal constituent. This implies that the postverbal constituent need not always be discourse-new; it may, on the contrary, represent quite familiar information, given the appropriate discourse conditions, i.e. as long as it is relatively less familiar than the preverbal constituent. For Birner (1995), this cannot be accounted for by an analysis in which the postverbal NP is characterised as presentational focus and, therefore, discourse-new. Given that both in English and in Italian/Spanish, inversion is used as some sort of focalisation device, we would expect the inverted Ss in the NNS of our study to be discourse-new or focus. It has to be stressed, however, that Italian and Spanish make use of this device with all verb types, whereas in NS English inversion appears to be restricted mostly to unaccusative Vs of existence and appearance, which in principle could lead to the expectation that our learners will use postverbal subjects in syntactic contexts in which it is not found in native English, as pointed out at the end of Section 2.1. We will return to this issue in Section 3 below. 2.2.2

Brief remarks on the definition of focus and topic

Focus and topic have been used here as common labels for new and old information, respectively, but these labels are just a first approximation to name

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concepts and processes which may be adequate to express the relation between information structure and syntactic configurations (see Belletti 2004b: 42, note 1, for a similar comment). Regarding the old vs. new information dichotomy, Prince (1981, 1992) distinguishes between hearer status (hearer-old. vs. hearer-new) and discourse status (discourse-old vs. discourse-new) and argues that only the latter distinction is relevant for subjecthood. There is also a third status for an entity in discourse: inferrables, defined by Prince (1992: 312) as “NPs evoking entities which were not previously mentioned and which I as the reader had no prior knowledge of, but whose existence I could infer on the basis of some entity that was previously evoked and some belief I have about such entities”. Compare the following examples used by Prince (1992: 305) to characterise inferrables: (22)

a. He passed by the door of the Bastille and the door was painted purple. b. He passed by the Bastille and the door was painted purple.

In (22a) the door is discourse-old, as it has been mentioned before, the hearer is assumed to have a mental representation of it. In contrast the door in (22b) is not strictly speaking discourse-old, but it is treated as though it were already known to the hearer. Indeed, the hearer knows that the speaker is talking about the door of the Bastille, so it is not quite discourse-new. As Prince (1992) notices, inferrables have a double status as hearer-old (and discourse-old) entities, in that they rely on the earlier presence of another entity (e.g. the Bastille) triggering the inference, and as hearer-new (and discourse-new), in that the hearer is not expected to already have in his or her head the entity concerned. The question that arises is whether they can be collapsed with one or the other category, whether they form a separate category, or whether we have some sort of information continuum, with inferrables somewhere in the middle. The continuum or “gradience” approach is adopted by Kaltenböck (2005) in his corpus analysis of it-extraposition structures in English. He defines old (or given) information as “retrievable” from the preceding co(n)text and new information as not thus derivable (see Geluykens 1991 and Firbas 1992 on the concept of retrievability – or recoverability). Retrievability is a relative concept: some entities are more retrievable than others, depending on whether they can be derived directly (evoked) from the context (as in [22a]) or indirectly via inferences (inferrable), where context comprises both the verbal “co-text”, as well as the situational context. This approach looks at the finished product of verbal interaction, the corpus text, rather than focusing on speakers’ assumptions (referred to as the “psychologist’s view”) (see Kaltenböck 2005: Section 4.1). In our study, both evoked and inferrable entities are considered to be topics, on the basis of Prince’s (1992) analysis of Ss and Birner’s (1994, 1995) findings that both entities are treated alike (as discourse-old) in inversion structures. As for new or “irretrievable” information, it can either be brand-new or new-anchored (an irretrievable state of affairs or entity, which is in some way linked to – “anchored in” – the previous context). We consider these as focus, together with what Prince (1992) refers to as unused (discourse-new, hearer-old

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entities). An example of an unused entity is given in (23a) (from Prince 1992), where the public is discourse-new but the reader is expected to know of its existence. As for new-anchored, notice that the postverbal subject in the corpus example in (23b) is new in the sense that the idea it introduces has not been mentioned before, but it is anchored in that this work refers to what is mentioned in the preceding context. (23)

a. … from reporters eager to tell the public about … (from Prince 1992: 312) b. So should scientists thus be condemned for allowing it to become possible for these women to have babies? Certainly there exists a demand for this work to be done. (from the LOCNESS corpus, file ICLE-ALEV0014.8)

We thus consider topic and focus as concepts which encompass a variety of notions which are best analysed in terms of a gradience.11, 12 2.3

Postverbal Ss at the syntax-phonology interface

Together with discourse notions such as “newness” or “focus”, choice of ordering is influenced by properties to do with the phonetic realisation of the strings of words generated by the grammar. Thus, at the syntax-phonology interface, there can be operations affecting the linear ordering of constituents which are not triggered by syntactic features. This is presumably what happens in structures involving “Heavy NP-Shift”, where a “heavy” NP appears to have been “displaced” to the end of the sentence.13 Thus, while (24a) shows canonical VNP-PP, the non-canonical V-PP-NP order in (24b) is also possible with a “heavy” NP. (24)

a. I bought [NP a book written by a specialist in environmental issues] [PP for my sister]. b. I bought [PP for my sister] [NP a book written by a specialist in environmental issues].

The generalisation that “heavier” constituents should follow “lighter” constituents is essentially what is known as the “end-weight” principle (Quirk et al. 1972). Heaviness can be defined simply as a matter of string length (number of words) or on the basis of more sophisticated criteria to do with grammatical complexity (see Arnold et al. 2000 for a review of these two approaches). In fact, the two concepts are difficult to separate neatly, as revealed by Wasow’s (1997) corpus study, which shows high correlations among the various characterisations of heaviness. In sum, long and complex elements tend to be placed towards the end of the clause, an operation which reduces the processing burden and, thus, eases comprehension by the receiver (see Hawkins 1994). Since long and complex grammatical elements typically also carry new information, the endweight principle and the discourse principle by which new information tends to

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be placed towards the end of the clause (focalisation) appear to reinforce each other (see Biber et al. 1999: 898). As pointed out by Arnold et al. (2000: 34) “items that are new to the discourse tend to be complex, and items that are given tend to be simple”. The end-weight principle appears to be in operation also in structures involving postverbal Ss. Culicover & Levine (2001) claim that certain structures which appear to be the result of locative inversion become a good deal less natural with “lighter NPs”, as shown in (25) (highlighting is ours), and analyse such structures as involving Heavy-NP shift. (25)

a. *Into the room walked carefully Robin. b. Into the room walked carefully the students in the class who had heard about the social psych experiment that we were about to perpetrate. (from Culicover & Levine 2001: 291)

Our own analysis of the corpus examples used by Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) (L&RH) in their study of locative inversion reveals, indeed, that overwhelmingly the postverbal S is heavy. When it is a proper noun or a relatively light NP, it is normally followed by material in apposition, as in (26) (highlighting is ours). (26)

a. And when it is over, off will go Clay, smugly smirking all the way to the box office, the only person better off for all the fuss. (R. Kogan, “Andrew Dice Clay Isn’t Worth ‘SNL’ Flap” 4, cited in L&RH: 221) b. Above it flew a flock of butterflies, the soft blues and the spring azures complemented by the gold and black of the tiger swallowtails. (M. L’Engle A Swiftly Tilting Planet, 197, cited in L&RH: 257)

The gradience approach adopted for information status is also adopted in our study for “heaviness”: the heavier an NP, the more likely it is to be placed in clause-final position. This approach has the additional advantage that it can be used to measure “relative” weight, which has been shown to be relevant in studies involving two constituents which may appear in different orders, such as the direct and indirect object of ditransitive Vs (Arnold et al. 2000). The relatively “free” word order of Spanish and Italian means that the principle of end-weight may be less noticeable in these languages. Given that its general purpose appears to be related to easing the processing burden on the receiver, by placing long, complex (and new) elements towards the end of the clause, we will assume that this is a universal processing principle (Frazier 2004). Thus (27a), which shows canonical word order in Spanish with the adjunct PP following the NP complement, appears to be less “natural” than (27b), where the heavy object follows the PP adjunct.

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a. Vi [NP los libros que tanto gustaban al padre de tu vecino] [PP en la librería]. I saw [NP the books that your neighbour’s father liked so much] [PP in the bookshop] b. Vi [PP en la librería] [NP los libros que tanto gustaban al padre de tu vecino].

The conclusion, then, is that long and complex information tends to be placed at the end in both English and Spanish/Italian. Therefore, we expect learners to produce postverbal subjects which are long and complex, as a reflection of this general processing mechanism. As we have seen, the principle of end-weight interacts with information structure principles which operate at the syntax-discourse interface, by which (discourse-) new information tends to be placed towards the end of the clause. Thus, Ss which are focus, long and complex tend to occur postverbally in those structures which allow them in both English, on the one hand, and Spanish and Italian, on the other hand. This is also the prediction made for the learners in our study.14 3.

Previous L2 findings

Little is known about the production of postverbal Ss in L2 English with intransitive Vs, apart from the fact that they are found with unaccusative Vs. White’s (1985, 1986) studies on subject-verb inversion, as a feature of the NSP, which are based on grammaticality judgements, are rather inconclusive, due mostly to verb choice, as pointed out by Oshita (2004: 106). Two production studies, Zobl (1989) and Rutherford (1989), support the hypothesis that learners with Spanish L1 produce VS only with unaccusatives, but are rather small in scale. Zobl (1989) reports from a small corpus that learners of L2 English with Null S L1s (mostly Japanese, Spanish and Arabic) occasionally produce postverbal Ss with unaccusatives, as shown in (28) (highlighting is ours). (28)

a. I was just patient until dried my clothes. (L1 Japanese) b. Sometimes comes a good regular wave. (L1 Japanese) (Zobl 1989: 204)

Similarly, Rutherford (1989) reports that L1 Spanish and Arabic speakers produce postverbal Ss with unaccusatives in a written corpus of L2 English, as in (29) (highlighting is ours), but never with unergatives.

98 (29)

Cristóbal Lozano and Amaya Mendikoetxea a. In the town lived a small Indian. (L1 Spanish) b. On this particular place called G… happened a story which now appears on all Mexican history books…. (L1 Spanish) c. After that, they’ll be lead to their house, and with that comes the end of the wedding. (L1 Arabic) d. The bride was very attractive, on her face appeared those two red cheeks… (L1 Arabic) (Rutherford 1989: 178-179)

Zobl (1989) and Rutherford (1989), however, differ in their explanation of why VS order is found with unaccusative verbs. For Zobl (1989), this word order results from the syntactic S of an unaccusative sentence being actually the logical or semantic object of V or the theme,15 what we have been referring to as its internal argument (see Section 2.1.2). This word order preserves at S-Structure the position occupied by the internal argument at D-Structure (see [12b] above) and therefore we do not expect unergatives to appear in VS structures since their only argument is an external argument (see [12a]). VS structures are just one type of solution to the problem of how learners map logical relations to surface structure configurations in languages like English, where Ss and Os are defined in terms of their structural position (see examples [1]-[6] in Zobl [1989: 204] for other solutions learners come up with). For Zobl (1989), the production of VS structures is developmental and precedes a stage in which learners are able to determine the canonical alignment between semantic roles and syntactic structure. Rutherford (1989), however, argues that VS order in the learner English of Spanish and Arabic L1 speakers is the direct result of transfer. His main hypothesis is that “the tendency for canonical word order permutation in written ILs [interlanguages] will correlate directly with the propensity of the learner’s native language to permute its own canonical constituents” (Rutherford 1989: 166). Crucially, Rutherford’s prediction is that not all word order differences will lead to transfer. Transfer is expected when the learners’ L1 has what Rutherford (1989) refers to as “Pragmatic Word Order” (PWO), but not when L1 and L2 show different “Grammatical Word Orders” (GWO). Thus, Spanish and Italian are basically SVO languages, like English, and, as was discussed in Section 2 above, variations on this word order are mostly due to properties operating at the syntax-discourse interface, showing what Rutherford refers to as PWO. On the other hand, Japanese and English differ in their canonical word order: SOV vs. SVO. While transfer is expected in the L2 English of Italian and Spanish (as well as Arabic) L1 speakers, this is not the case for Japanese L1 speakers. Rutherford’s predictions are borne out by his results. While no violations of word order were found in the written production of 21 Japanese L1 learners of English (but see Zobl 1989), the 59 compositions produced by Spanish L1 learners of English contained 20 instances of violations of English canonical word order and in virtually all cases the resulting order was (X)VS (see Rutherford 1989: 168). For Rutherford (1989), this is the result of transfer from PWO L1s. However, he offers no explanation as to why (X)VS order in the IL of Spanish (and Arabic) L1

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speakers is restricted to a definable class of lexical verbs: those which we have referred to as unaccusative verbs of existence and appearance, following Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995). It has to be mentioned that both Zobl’s (1989) and Rutherford’s (1989) conclusions on VS production by Spanish L1 learners of English are based on a relatively small number of VS instances. This is roughly 20 instances in Rutherford (1989). As for Zobl’s (1989) study, 13 examples of VS order are found in the written work of 114 informants from different language backgrounds, of which 90 are Japanese and 10 Spanish L1 speakers; 10 of those examples were produced by Japanese speakers, which is used by Zobl (1989) to rule out transfer, contrary to Rutherford’s (1989) results. Though these studies point out that the unergative-unaccusative distinction is psychologically real for learners, not enough data is provided to support their claims and very little information is provided about the learners, sample size and so on. Oshita’s (2004) is the first study to use a large electronic corpus: Longman Learners’ Corpus (version 1.1, March 1993, LLC). His purpose is to investigate the psychological reality of null expletives, for which he extracts 941 token sentences on 10 common unaccusative verbs and 640 token sentences with 10 common unergative verbs from compositions written by speakers of Italian (684), Spanish (1,079), Japanese (1,363) and Korean (236). For VS order, he extracts sentences with preverbal overt expletives (i.e. it, there) and null expletives. L1 Spanish and Italian learners produced postverbal Ss only with unaccusatives (never with unergatives), as in (30) (highlighting is ours). Both groups’ production ratios were similar: 14/238 (6%) Spanish; 14/346 (4%) Italian. (30)

a. …it will happen something exciting... (L1 Spanish) b. …because in our century have appeared the car and the plane… (L1 Spanish) c. …it happened a tragic event… (L1 Italian) d. One day happened a revolution. (L1 Italian) (Oshita 2004: 119-120)

Additionally, in a study of existential there-V-S constructions, PalaciosMartínez & Martínez-Insua (2006) report that Spanish learners of English (ICLE corpus) use the verb be, except for 5 tokens with the unaccusative exist, which represents 1.1% of all existential there-constructions. While this study does not address the issue of unaccusativity and postverbal Ss, it reveals that the only verb, other than be, that appears in these postverbal S structures is an unaccusative verb. All these studies show a remarkably consistent pattern in which unaccusative and unergative verbs are treated differently by learners of English regarding the occurrence of postverbal Ss. This adds to other type of evidence, provided in Oshita (2004), which points towards the fact that the Unaccusative Hypothesis, that is, the unaccusative-unergative distinction, is psychologically real in L2 acquisition, as demonstrated by studies on learners’ auxiliary selection

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(Sorace 1993, 1995), the production of “passivised” unaccusative structures (Zobl 1989, Oshita 2000) and learners’ reluctance to accept SV order with unaccusatives (Oshita 2002). This is despite the fact that English lacks overt marking for unaccusatives, rendering the unergative-unaccusative distinction inaccessible: unaccusative Vs overwhelmingly appear in SV constructions and there is no auxiliary or morphological marker for unaccusative Vs. That is, although inversion structures with unaccusatives are found in English, as discussed at length in Section 2 above, the rarity of the construction makes it unlikely that such VS order is sufficiently represented in the input data to learners to count as positive evidence (see, by way of illustration, the percentages given in Biber et al. [1999: 945] for existential clauses with Vs other than be). Without entering the debate of whether VS order is developmental or the result of transfer, our study should be considered as part of the growing body of research which takes the Unaccusative Hypothesis to be psychologically real for L2 learners of English from speakers of Null Subject languages like Italian and Spanish, which is the reason for predicting that VS order will be found only with unaccusative verbs in our corpus (see Section 4 below). There are two aspects in which our study differs considerably from previous L2 studies: (i) we intend to show that unaccusativity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for VS order to occur, as it is not just the nature of V (unaccusativity), but crucially the features of S (heaviness and focus) that trigger inversion, and (ii) unlike previous L2 studies, we do not focus on errors, but rather on the conditions under which postverbal subjects are found. 4.

Hypotheses

As a general hypothesis, we expect Spanish and Italian advanced learners of L2 English to produce postverbal subjects in the same contexts in which inversion takes place in native English, given that, except for the condition on unaccusativity, the native English contexts are substantially the same as those for Spanish and Italian, as we have seen. We do not expect significant differences between the groups of Spanish and Italian learners. In particular, in accordance with previous L2 findings and the theoretical analysis in Section 2, we can hypothesise the following, (31-33). (31)

(32)

(33)

H1. Lexicon-Syntax interface: As reported in previous research, both groups of learners will produce postverbal Ss with unaccusatives only, but never with unergatives, as in L1 English. H2. Syntax-Phonology interface: Given our theoretical analysis, we predict that, in those contexts where inversion is allowed, both groups of learners will tend to place Ss in postverbal position when S is heavy. H3. Syntax-Discourse interface: Given our theoretical analysis, we predict that, in those contexts where inversion is allowed, both groups of learners will tend to place Ss in postverbal position when S is the focus.

Postverbal subjects at the interfaces in Spanish and Italian learners 5.

Method

5.1

Corpora

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We used the Spanish and Italian subcorpora of the International Corpus of Learner English, ICLE (Granger et al. 2002), which consists of 11 subcorpora of academic essays written by advanced L2 English learners of 11 different L1s. In total, nearly half a million words were used in our analyses (Table 1). Table 1. Corpora Corpus ICLE Spanish ICLE Italian TOTAL 5.2

Number of essays 251 392 643

Number of words 200,376 227,085 427,461

Analysis of concordances

Following Levin (1993) and Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995), we constructed an inventory of unaccusative (n = 32) and unergative (n = 41) lemmas in English (Table 2). The unaccusative Vs selected belong to those semantic classes that can be found in inversion structures in English (see Section 2.1.2). Searches were then performed with WordSmith Tools 4.0 (Scott 2002) on all verbal forms of the lemmas. All possible forms of the lemma (both native English and possible misspelt learner forms) were queried, e.g. for the lemma APPEAR: appear, appears, appearing, appeared, appeard, apear, apears, apearing, apeared, apeard. Additionally, the sentences under analysis were both grammatical and ungrammatical in native English since, as stated previously, we are not interested in ungrammaticality but rather in the conditions under which postverbal Ss appear. The concordances output by WordSmith were filtered manually according to 51 criteria to discard those structural contexts in which inversion in English is not possible, regardless of the nature of V. Approximately three quarters of the concordances output by the software turned out to be unusable since they did not meet the filtering criteria. For conciseness, we present here only the main filtering criteria, cf. (34) (see Lozano & Mendikoetxea in preparation for details on the filtering criteria). (34)

a. V must be intransitive (unaccusative or unergative, with either preverbal or postverbal S). We discarded (un)grammatical uses of transitive unaccusatives (e.g. parents grew their children) and letconstructions (e.g. let him develop).

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Cristóbal Lozano and Amaya Mendikoetxea b. V must be finite. We discarded instances of to-infinitive clauses (e.g. He would like to leave), infinitival clauses (e.g. to avoid this happen again), gerundive clauses (e.g. Returning to the title of this paper). c. V must be in the active voice with(out) auxiliary or modal. We discarded case of passivised unaccusatives (e.g. This situation has already been happened). d. S must be a Noun Phrase. We discarded cases of the NP being a clause, as in extraposition (e.g. it happened that the countries which make the weapons are…).

Table 2. Inventory of unaccusative and unergative verbs Unaccusatives Unergatives Semantic class: Semantic class: Semantic subclass: Existence: exist, flow, Emission Light emission: beam, grow, hide, live, remain, burn, flame, flash rise, settle, spread, survive Sound emission: bang, beat, blast, boom, clash, Appearance: appear, crack, crash, cry, know, arise, awake, begin, ring, roll, sing develop, emerge, flow***, Smell emission: smell follow, happen, occur, Substance emission: rise*** pour, sweat Disappearance: die, disappear Inherently directed motion: arrive, come, drop, enter, escape, fall, go, leave, pass, rise***, return

Communication

Manner of speaking: cry*, shout, sing* Talk verbs: speak, talk

Bodily processes

Breathe verbs: breathe, cough, cry*, sweat** Nonverbal expressions: laugh, sigh, smile

Manner of motion

Run verbs: fly, jump, run, swim, walk, ride, travel, slide

Performance

Monadic agentives: dance, phone, play, sing, work

sleep Snooze Total unaccusatives: 32 Total Unergatives: 41 Notes: (*) see also sound emission; (**) see also substance emission; (***) see also existence.

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Consider now the analysis of weight for the (pre- and postverbal) S of the concordances. Length in number of words has been typically used to measure heaviness (see Section 2.3). This measuring method is legitimate, yet it is unclear in previous studies where the dividing line between heavy/light lies, i.e. it is not known how long (in words) a constituent must be for it to be classified as heavy. Hence, we used three types of measurement to arrive at a satisfactory nominal heavy/light scale (Table 3): (i) a numeric scale (length in words, as in earlier research), (ii) an ordinal scale (ranging from 0 [lightest] to 3 [heaviest]) based on syntactic structure, as shown in the table, and (iii) a dichotomous nominal scale (light vs. heavy) based on the ordinal scale where the “light” category corresponds to ranks 0 and 1 in the ordinal scale, while “heavy” corresponds to 2 and 3. To our knowledge, there is no standardised scale linking syntactic structure to weight. We followed a basic (yet intuitive) principle to link syntactic structure to weight. The syntactic structure corresponding to “light” implies a basic structure with a pronoun (PRN) or a noun (N) as the head, with basic premodification and postmodification: either Ø, or a determiner (D) and/or an adjective (ADJ). The rest of the combinations were regarded as “heavy”, as shown in the table. Table 3. Scales for measuring weight Nominal scale

Ordinal scale

Syntactic structure

LIGHT

0

(D)

N PRN 1 (D) ADJ N HEAVY 2 (D) N PP (D) ADJ* N (D) (ADJ) N* 3 (D) N PP* (D) (ADJ) N AdjP* (D) ADJ N PP (D) N IP/CP (D) (ADJ) N* PP* (D) ADJ N* (PP*) Notes: (i) The asterisk (*) represents a complex (i.e. recursive) categorical or phrasal structure. (ii) Parentheses indicate the optional realisation of the bracketed category or phrase. To ensure that the nominal scale is a reliable measurement of the numeric scale, we performed a correlation test between the numeric and the ordinal scale. Results reveal that they are highly correlated [ȡ = 0.914, p