New resources for new challenges: Comparing vocabulary knowledge in ESL and EFL

English as an institutionalized second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) are both non-native varieties, but they present different acquisitional contexts (mainly naturalistic for ESL and mainly instructional for EFL). While each of these varieties has been studied for several decades now, it is only recently that they have started to be systematically compared with one another (see, e.g., Mukherjee & Hundt 2011). However, because they have traditionally been dealt with in different disciplines, namely contact linguistics for ESL and second language acquisition for EFL, we still lack fully comparable corpora for their comparative analysis. Consequently, most of the studies so far have had to rely on less than perfect data, being either very small sets of data (e.g. ESL student writing from ICE and EFL student essays from ICLE in Hundt & Vogel 2011) or data differing along one or several variables (e.g. ESL spontaneous conversations from ICE and EFL informal interviews from LINDSEI in Gilquin 2015). The compilation of a new spoken ESL corpus, the New Englishes Student Interviews (NESSI) corpus, collected according to the same design criteria as LINDSEI, a spoken EFL corpus, will make it possible, for the first time, to properly compare ESL and EFL in speech, a register claimed to be less subject to standardizing forces than writing and thus more likely to display innovations (Seidlhofer 2001). In this talk, I will present this new resource and will describe the results of a study carried out on its first compiled component, the Hong Kong subcorpus, which will be compared with the (mainland) Chinese subcorpus of LINDSEI. The point of comparison will be lexical: using a combination of automated measures of lexical complexity and manual examination of a picture description task included in both corpora, I will test whether the differences in acquisitional context between ESL and EFL students have consequences for their vocabulary knowledge. I will also show how the rich metadata accompanying both corpora can be put to good use to enhance our understanding of the links between ESL and EFL, and more generally between contact linguistics and SLA

Derivational morphology as a synchronic criterion of (non-)configurationality: typological evidence based on a comparative corpus analysis

The distinction between configurational languages vs non-configurational languages is generally based on (morpho-)syntactic criteria such as word order, phrase structure and inflection (among others Hale 1982, Bentz & Christiansen 2013). For example, it is usually claimed that case marking in non-configurational languages serves to indicate the syntactic grouping and grammatical functions which constituency and adjacency define in configurational languages (Hawkins 2004: 127). In this paper, we argue that morphological derivation may also serve as a correlating property of (non-)configurationality. More precisely, we focus on denominal verb formation in present-day English, Dutch and Greek. Our hypothesis is that highly configurational languages such as English do not need morphological marking of the change of the noun into the verbal word class because of the presence of syntactic marking of the insertion into the verbal constituent (explicit subject marking, fixed SVO, etc.), whereas in less configurational languages like Modern Greek (with no explicit subject marking and more flexible word order among others) the change of word class requires explicit morphological marking (aside from inflectional markers). Hence, denominal verb formation by conversion can be expected to be predominantly associated with configurational languages like English (e.g. bottleN > to bottleV), while denominal verbalization by affixation is more likely to be found in less configurational languages like Modern Greek (e.g. εμ-φιαλ-ώνω [emfialono] ‘to bottle’, derived by the combination of prefixation and suffixation). Dutch will serve as a test case for our hypothesis: since its syntactic configurationality can be considered intermediate between English and Modern Greek, we expect the proportion of conversion/affixation in the expression of denominal verb-formation to be situated in-between the proportions found for English and Modern Greek. Our method consists in a synchronic comparable corpus analysis, based on the Ten Ten web corpora available on SketchEngine (Kilgariff et al. 2014). References Bentz, C. & M. H. Christiansen. (2013). Linguistic adaptation: the trade-off between case marking and fixed word orders in Germanic and Romance languages. In: F. Shi & G. Peng (eds.), Eastward flows the great river. Festschrift in honor of Prof. William S-Y.Wang on his 80th birthday. Hong Kong: City University of Hong. 45-61. Hale, K. (1982). Preliminary Remarks on Configurationality. Unpublished paper, MIT. Hawkins, J.A. (2004). Efficiency and complexity in grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kilgarriff, A. et al. (2014). The Sketch Engine: ten years on. Lexicography 1:1. 7-36

Constrained communication and learner translated language: A corpus-based pilot study of L1 and L2 student translations

This presentation, situated at the interface of Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CBTS) and Learner Corpus Research (LCR), aims at comparing translated language produced by native speakers and foreign language learners of the target language (TL). As repeatedly shown in the CBTS literature (e.g. Laviosa 2002), translated language is characterized by a range of typical features that set it apart from non-translated language, such as simplification, increased explicitness, normalization/conventionalization and source language (SL) influence. As rightly pointed out by Lanstyák & Heltai (2012), however, these features have been attributed to other varieties of constrained communication as well, such as L2 writing, which suggests that they may be more general characteristics of language contact and constrained language production (cf. also Kruger & Van Rooy 2016, Kruger 2017). With this in mind, we address an issue that has not received much attention in CBTS to date, namely translation directionality, i.e. whether translation is done into the translator’s L1 or L2 (Campbell 1998, Beeby 2009, Pokorn 2010). We hypothesize that L2 translation, being both translated and learner language, displays more visible features of constrainedness than L1 translation. In order to investigate this empirically, we conduct a corpus-based pilot study devoted to the impact of directionality on the linguistic traits of student translations, focusing on simplification, explicitation and SL interference. The corpus data consist of two French source texts (300-word newspaper articles) and their translations into English by 13 university students majoring in modern languages or translation (6 native speakers of English and 7 French-speaking learners of English). The analysis relies on the automatic extraction of simplification and explicitation indicators traditionally studied in CBTS (e.g. lexical variety, core vocabulary coverage, mean sentence length for simplification; see Laviosa 1998, Bernardini et al. 2016). The automatic stage is complemented with a thorough manual annotation of simplification and explicitation shifts as well as traces of SL interference, as, arguably, these can take on different forms, many of which cannot be fully captured by automatic analyses. The differences between L1 and L2 translation are further analyzed in the light of the keylogging data and screen recordings collected while the participants were translating the two source texts, so as to illustrate the added value of methodological plurality for learner translation research