Not to Teach but Give Insights: Corpus-based Approach in Portuguese-English and Portuguese-Russian Cross-linguistic Error Correction

AbstractForeign language learners make mechanical errors caused by cross-linguistic influence. It comes from trying to extract information from a native language (L1) and apply it in a second or foreign language (L2/FL). There are not many didactic materials proposing a set of techniques that train the skills to keep L1 and L2/FL apart and help students to reduce cross- linguistic errors. In alternative to a traditional rule-based teaching, a corpus-based approach provides a framework for exploring online corpora to give insights into authentic language use. The paper describes the types of errors caused by cross-linguistic Portuguese-English and Portuguese-Russian influence, and illustrates how some monolingual and bilingual online corpora may be rich sources for raising learner's awareness to face such linguistic obstacles

Designing a Russian Idiom-Annotated Corpus

This paper describes the development of an idiom-annotated corpus of Russian. The corpus is compiled from freely available resources online and contains texts of different genres. The idiom extraction, annotation procedure, and a pilot experiment using the new corpus are outlined in the paper. Considering the scarcity of publicly available Russian annotated corpora, the corpus is a much-needed resource that can be utilized for literary and linguistic studies, pedagogy as well as for various Natural Language Processing tasks

A Crosslinguistic Study of Child Code-Switching within the Noun Phrase: A Usage-Based Perspective

This paper aims to investigate whether language use can account for the differences in code-switching within the article-noun phrase in children exposed to English and German, French and Russian, and English and Polish. It investigates two aspects of language use: equivalence and segmentation. Four children’s speech is derived from corpora of naturalistic interactions recorded between the ages of two and three and used as a source of the children’s article-noun phrases. We demonstrate that children’s CS cannot be fully explained by structural equivalence in each two languages: there is CS in French-Russian although French does, and Russian does not, use articles. We also demonstrate that language pairs which use higher numbers of articles types, and therefore have more segmented article-noun phrases, are also more open to switching. Lastly, we show that longitudinal use of monolingual articles-noun phrases corresponds with the trends in the use of bilingual article-noun phrases. The German-English child only starts to mix English articles once they become more established in monolingual combinations while the French-Russian child ceases to mix French proto-articles with Russian nouns once target articles enter frequent use. These findings are discussed in the context of other studies which report code-switching across different language pairs