한국 대학생들의 논증적 에세이에 나타난 절과 구 복잡성의 발달

학위논문(석사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 사범대학 외국어교육과(영어전공), 2023. 2. 오선영.영어 글쓰기 발달에 관한 연구들은 문법적 복잡성(grammatical complexity)을 학습자의 능숙도를 구별하는 중요한 지표로 인식하고 있다. 초기 연구들은 주로 절 복잡성(clausal complexity)에 기반해 문법적 복잡성을 측정하였지만, 최근 연구들은 구 복잡성(phrasal complexity)에 초점을 두고 있다. 이러한 변화는 절 복잡성이 일상 대화가 가진 특징으로 글쓰기의 초기 발달 단계를 나타내는 반면, 구 복잡성, 특히 명사구의 복잡성은 학문적 글(academic writing)이 가진 복잡성의 전형으로써 높은 수준의 발달 단계를 나타낸다는 인식에 기반하고 있다. 하지만 일부 연구들은 명사구의 복잡성이 글쓰기 능숙도와 큰 관련이 없다는 상반된 결과를 보이고 있는데, 이는 대부분의 연구들이 학습자 모국어가 문법적 복잡성에 미치는 영향을 고려하지 않고 다양한 모국어를 가진 학습자들에 의해 만들어진 코퍼스를 사용했기 때문일 수 있다. 이에 본 연구는 한국인 대학생들이 작성한 글을 분석하여 절과 구의 복잡성이 글쓰기 능숙도와 연관성이 있는지 살펴보고, 그러한 연관성에 크게 기여한 복잡성 특징들을 바탕으로 문법적 복잡성의 발달 패턴을 추정하고자 하였다. 또한 학생들의 글을 질적으로 분석하여, 특정 복잡성 특징을 구현할 때 자주 쓰이는 어휘와 오류 빈도 및 유형을 파악함으로써 능숙도 집단 간의 차이를 더 자세히 묘사하고자 하였다. 본 연구에 사용된 코퍼스는 연세 영어 학습자 코퍼스(Yonsei English Learner Corpus, YELC 2011)에서 추출한 234개의 논증적 에세이로 구성되어 있으며, 이는 CEFR에 기반하여 초급, 중급, 고급의 글쓰기 능숙도를 나타내는 세 개의 하위 코퍼스로 구분되었다. 품사 태깅된 코퍼스를 바탕으로 정규표현식(regular expressions)을 사용하여, Biber et al. (2011)이 제안한 발달단계에 있는 9개의 절 복잡성 특징과 8개의 구 복잡성 특징을 추출하여 각각의 빈도를 계산하였다. 피어슨 카이제곱검정(a Pearson Chi-square test) 결과, 글쓰기 능숙도가 절과 구의 복잡성과 유의한 연관성이 있다는 결론이 도출되었다. 사후검정으로 잔차 분석(a residual analysis)을 수행한 결과, 특히 5개 복잡성 특징이 이러한 연관성에 크게 기여했음이 밝혀졌다. 주목할 만한 발견은 각 능숙도 집단의 주요 복잡성 특징이 Biber et al. (2011)이 제안한 발달단계와 일치하며 따라서 한국인 대학생의 발달 패턴이 두 개의 매개변수, 즉 (1) 구조적 형태와 (2) 통사적 기능에 의해 설명될 수 있다는 점이다. 즉, 한국 대학생들의 문법적 복잡성은 (i) 절의 구성 성분으로 기능하는 정형 종속절(finite dependent clauses functioning as clause constituents)인 부사절의 빈번한 사용에서 (ii) 명사구의 구성 성분으로 기능하는 정형 종속절(finite clause types function as NP constituents)인 WH 관계절에 대한 의존을 거쳐 (iii) 명사구의 구성 성분으로 기능하는 종속구(dependent phrasal structures functioning as noun phrase constituents)인 of 전치사구에 대한 선호로 발달하는 것으로 나타났다. 예상과 달리, 명사의 선수식어(premodifier)로 사용되는 형용사 및 명사의 빈도는 글쓰기 능숙도와 큰 연관성이 없는 것으로 나타났다. 이에 관해 학생들의 글을 질적 분석한 결과, 첫째, 초급 수준의 글은 쓰기 지시문(writing prompts)에 제시된 형용사+명사 조합을 반복적으로 사용하는 경향을 보였다. 둘째, 명사+명사 구조와 관련한 오류가 능숙도가 높아질수록 현저히 낮아지는 경향을 보였다. 마지막으로, 보어절(complement clauses)과 관련해서는 모든 능숙도 수준의 학생들이 매우 한정적인 종류의 통제 명사(controlling nouns)를 사용했으며, 학문적인 글 보다는 일상 대화에서 쓰이는 통제 동사(controlling verbs)를 사용하였다. 이러한 연구 결과는 크게 세가지 교육적 함의를 시사한다. 첫째, 경험적으로 도출된 문법적 복잡성의 발달 단계를 상세한 평가 척도 설명자(rating scale descriptors) 개발과 보다 맞춤화 된 수업 설계를 위해 활용해야 한다. 둘째, 학문적인 글에서 보어절과 함께 자주 사용되는 통제 명사 및 동사에 대한 교실 수업을 통해, 학습자들이 문법적 구조를 학문적인 어휘로 실현할 수 있도록 해야 한다. 마지막으로, 특히 명사를 선수식하는 명사 및 관계대명사절의 사용에 있어 학습자의 글에서 자주 발견되는 오류를 시정함으로써, 문법 구조 사용에 대한 정확성을 향상시켜야 한다.Studies that explore L2 writing development identify grammatical complexity as a primary discriminator for different proficiency levels of L2 writers. In the 1990s, grammatical complexity in L2 writing was often measured by clausal complexity, but the kind of complexity that has recently received particular attention is phrasal complexity. Such a move follows the recognition that clausal complexity represents the complexity of conversation and beginning levels of writing development, whereas phrasal complexity, specifically noun phrase complexity, represents the complexity of academic writing and advanced developmental levels. Some L2 writing studies, however, have yielded conflicting results, showing that phrasal features as noun modifiers have little predictive power for writing quality. One possible reason underlying these inconsistent results might be that most studies in this area have used corpus data from learners of heterogenous L1 backgrounds with no consideration for the significant effect of L1 on the use of complexity features in L2 writing. Thus, this study analyzed essay samples produced only by L1 Korean writers to investigate whether clausal and phrasal complexity is associated with L2 writing proficiency and, if so, what developmental patterns can be observed based on complexity features that contribute substantially to the association. A qualitative analysis of student writing was followed up to provide a detailed description of proficiency-level differences, especially with respect to lexical realizations and error types associated with specific complexity features. The corpus used in the present study contained 234 argumentative essays written by first-year college students, including 78 low-rated essays (A1 and A1+ levels of the CEFR), 78 mid-rated essays (B1 and B1+ levels of the CEFR), and 78 high-rated essays (B2+, C1, and C2 levels of the CEFR). Drawing on Biber et al.s (2011) developmental index, the nine clausal and eight phrasal complexity features were extracted from the tagged corpus using regular expressions to measure the frequency of each feature. The result of a Pearson Chi-square test demonstrated a statistically significant association between the three proficiency levels and the use of clausal and phrasal complexity features. The post-hoc residual analysis revealed five complexity features with great contribution to the association: finite adverbial clause, noun complement clause, WH relative clause, prepositional phrase (of), and prepositional phrase (other). Especially noteworthy is the finding that the main source of complexity at each proficiency level agrees with its corresponding developmental stage reported by Biber et al. (2011), and thus, developmental patterns for Korean college students are successfully explained by two parameters: (1) structural form (finite dependent clauses vs. dependent phrases) and (2) syntactic function (clause constituents vs. noun phrase constituents). Specifically, the development proceeds from (i) clausal complexity mainly via finite adverbial clauses (i.e., finite dependent clauses functioning as clause constituents); through (ii) the intermediate stage of heavy reliance on WH relative clauses (i.e., finite clause types functioning as noun phrase constituents); to finally (iii) phrasal complexity primarily via prepositional phrases (of) (i.e., phrasal structures functioning as noun phrase constituents). Surprisingly, premodifying adjectives and nouns were found to have no significant association with L2 writing proficiency despite being noun-modifying phrasal features. The subsequent qualitative analysis of student writing, however, illustrated greater proficiency of the highly rated essays in using these features in two regards. First, the lower-rated essays drew much more heavily on adjective-noun sequences presented in writing prompts than the higher-rated essays. Second, the number of errors in the composition of noun-noun sequences noticeably decreased in the higher-rated essays. The qualitative observation concerning that-complement clauses, on the other hand, identified the reliance on a limited set of controlling nouns and conversational styles of controlling verbs in student writing across proficiency levels. Three main pedagogical implications are provided based on the findings: (i) the use of empirically derived developmental stages to create detailed rating scale descriptors and provide more customized writing courses on the use of complexity features; (ii) the need for classroom instruction on common academic controlling nouns and verbs used in that complement clauses given the importance of academically oriented lexical realizations of grammatical structures; and (iii) the need to address recurrent errors, particularly in terms of using premodifying nouns and relative clauses.CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Background of the Study 1 1.2 Purpose of the Study 4 1.3 Research Questions 5 1.4 Organization of the Thesis 6 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW 8 2.1 Grammatical Complexity in L2 Writing 8 2.1.1 Definition of Grammatical Complexity 9 2.1.2 Grammatical Complexity in L2 Writing Studies 13 2.2 Criticism of Traditional Measures of Grammatical Complexity 15 2.2.1 Reductiveness and Redundancy of Length- and Subordination-based Measures 16 2.2.2 Inappropriateness of the T-unit Approach to the Assessment of Writing Development 21 2.3 Measures of Grammatical Complexity in L2 Writing 24 2.3.1 Clausal and Phrasal Complexity in Relation to L2 Writing Development 25 2.3.2 Studies on Clausal and Phrasal Complexity in L2 Writing 31 2.4 Variation in the Use of Grammatical Complexity Features 36 2.4.1 The Effect of L1 Background 37 2.4.2 The Effect of Genre 43 2.4.3 The Effect of Timing Condition 46 CHAPTER 3. METHODOLOGY 50 3.1 Learner Corpus 50 3.1.1 Description of YELC 2011 50 3.1.2 Description of a Subset of YELC 2011 used in the Study 53 3.2 Grammatical Complexity Measures 55 3.3 Corpus Tagging and Automatic Extraction 59 3.4 Data Analysis 65 CHAPTER 4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 70 4.1 Descriptive Statistics 70 4.2 The Association between L2 Writing Proficiency and Grammatical Complexity 76 4.3 The Developmental Patterns of Grammatical Complexity 77 4.4 The Grammatical Complexity Features with Great Contribution to the Association 84 4.4.1 Finite Adverbial Clauses 84 4.4.2 Prepositional Phrases as Nominal Postmodifiers 92 4.4.3 WH Relative Clauses 100 4.4.4 Finite Complement Clauses Controlled by Nouns 106 4.5 The Grammatical Complexity Features with Little Contribution to the Association 112 4.5.1 Premodifying Adjectives 113 4.5.2 Nouns as Nominal Premodifiers 120 4.5.3 Finite Complement Clauses Controlled by Verbs or Adjectives 125 CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION 136 5.1 Major Findings 136 5.2 Pedagogical Implications 139 5.3 Limitations and Prospect for Future Research 142 REFERENCES 145 APPENDICES 161 ABSTRACT IN KOREAN 165석

Gender congruency between languages influence second-language comprehension: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

In the present study we explore whether gender congruency between languages modulates bilinguals’ access to their second language words presented in isolation. We predicted that accessing L2 words that have a different gender across languages (gender-incongruent) would be more costly and require more effort than accessing same-gender words (gender-congruent) due to language co-activation, even when no access to L1 was required to perform the task. Additionally, we intended to shed some light into the mechanism underlying the gender congruency effect. To these aims, we compared the performance of Spanish native speakers with that of Italian-Spanish bilinguals (Italian native speakers) during a lexical decision task. The participants saw Spanish words that were gender-congruent and gender-incongruent between languages while event related potentials were recorded. Moreover, as an additional manipulation, we selected nouns that in both languages could be ambiguous or unambiguous. With the aim to examine whether the underlying mechanism is activation of multiple information during word processing, we focused on the N400 component, related with the effort to integrate lexical-semantic information: higher N400 amplitudes indicate greater effort. According to our prediction, Italian-Spanish bilinguals produced more errors and evoked larger N400 amplitudes when accessing gender-incongruent than gender-congruent words, while no differences appeared for Spanish native speakers between conditions. These results indicate that gender-incongruent words are harder to integrate compared with gender-congruent words, and that bilinguals automatically activate the grammatical gender of both languages during L2 language comprehension. Nevertheless, the results do not seem to support the assumption of a similar mechanism responsible for the gender congruency and the ambiguity effects. In short, the gender-congruency effect seems to originate due to activation of multiple information at the lexical level which generates difficulties to integrate at the semantic level during word access.This work has been supported by Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (RED2018-102615-T), by Feder Andalucía (A-SEJ-416-UGR20) to D.P., by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-111359 GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) and by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili to P. F. (2019PFR-URV-B2-32). Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Granada / CBUA

Theories and methods

The notion of formulaicity has received increasing attention in disciplines and areas as diverse as linguistics, literary studies, art theory and art history. In recent years, linguistic studies of formulaicity have been flourishing and the very notion of formulaicity has been approached from various methodological and theoretical perspectives and with various purposes in mind. The linguistic approach to formulaicity is still in a state of rapid development and the objective of the current volume is to present the current explorations in the field. Papers collected in the volume make numerous suggestions for further development of the field and they are arranged into three complementary parts. The first part, with three chapters, presents new theoretical and methodological insights as well as their practical application in the development of custom-designed software tools for identification and exploration of formulaic language in texts. Two papers in the second part explore formulaic language in the context of language learning. Finally, the third part, with three chapters, showcases descriptive research on formulaic language conducted primarily from the perspectives of corpus linguistics and translation studies. The volume will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of formulaic language either from a theoretical or a practical perspective

Formulaic language

The notion of formulaicity has received increasing attention in disciplines and areas as diverse as linguistics, literary studies, art theory and art history. In recent years, linguistic studies of formulaicity have been flourishing and the very notion of formulaicity has been approached from various methodological and theoretical perspectives and with various purposes in mind. The linguistic approach to formulaicity is still in a state of rapid development and the objective of the current volume is to present the current explorations in the field. Papers collected in the volume make numerous suggestions for further development of the field and they are arranged into three complementary parts. The first part, with three chapters, presents new theoretical and methodological insights as well as their practical application in the development of custom-designed software tools for identification and exploration of formulaic language in texts. Two papers in the second part explore formulaic language in the context of language learning. Finally, the third part, with three chapters, showcases descriptive research on formulaic language conducted primarily from the perspectives of corpus linguistics and translation studies. The volume will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of formulaic language either from a theoretical or a practical perspective

Diagnosing Reading strategies: Paraphrase Recognition

Paraphrase recognition is a form of natural language processing used in tutoring, question answering, and information retrieval systems. The context of the present work is an automated reading strategy trainer called iSTART (Interactive Strategy Trainer for Active Reading and Thinking). The ability to recognize the use of paraphrase—a complete, partial, or inaccurate paraphrase; with or without extra information—in the student\u27s input is essential if the trainer is to give appropriate feedback. I analyzed the most common patterns of paraphrase and developed a means of representing the semantic structure of sentences. Paraphrases are recognized by transforming sentences into this representation and comparing them. To construct a precise semantic representation, it is important to understand the meaning of prepositions. Adding preposition disambiguation to the original system improved its accuracy by 20%. The preposition sense disambiguation module itself achieves about 80% accuracy for the top 10 most frequently used prepositions. The main contributions of this work to the research community are the preposition classification and generalized preposition disambiguation processes, which are integrated into the paraphrase recognition system and are shown to be quite effective. The recognition model also forms a significant part of this contribution. The present effort includes the modeling of the paraphrase recognition process, featuring the Syntactic-Semantic Graph as a sentence representation, the implementation of a significant portion of this design demonstrating its effectiveness, the modeling of an effective preposition classification based on prepositional usage, the design of the generalized preposition disambiguation module, and the integration of the preposition disambiguation module into the paraphrase recognition system so as to gain significant improvement

UU-Tax at SemEval-2022 Task 3: Improving the generalizability of language models for taxonomy classification through data augmentation

This paper presents our strategy to address the SemEval-2022 Task 3 PreTENS: Presupposed Taxonomies Evaluating Neural Network Semantics. The goal of the task is to identify if a sentence is deemed acceptable or not, depending on the taxonomic relationship that holds between a noun pair contained in the sentence. For sub-task 1 -- binary classification -- we propose an effective way to enhance the robustness and the generalizability of language models for better classification on this downstream task. We design a two-stage fine-tuning procedure on the ELECTRA language model using data augmentation techniques. Rigorous experiments are carried out using multi-task learning and data-enriched fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model, UU-Tax, is indeed able to generalize well for our downstream task. For sub-task 2 -- regression -- we propose a simple classifier that trains on features obtained from Universal Sentence Encoder (USE). In addition to describing the submitted systems, we discuss other experiments that employ pre-trained language models and data augmentation techniques. For both sub-tasks, we perform error analysis to further understand the behaviour of the proposed models. We achieved a global F1_Binary score of 91.25% in sub-task 1 and a rho score of 0.221 in sub-task 2