Postverbal subjects at the interfaces in Spanish and Italian learners of L2 English: a corpus analysis

The purpose of this article is to characterise the production of postverbal subjects in two ICLE subcorpora (Italian and Spanish). The question has been dealt with before in the literature with emphasis on the production of ungrammatical inversion structures in L2 English of speakers from a variety of L1s, but in quite a scattered, unsystematic and rather intuitive fashion. Our approach seeks to identify the conditions under which learners produce inverted subjects. Based on previous research findings and our review of the theoretical literature, we hypothesise that for Spanish and Italian learners of L2 English, there is a tendency for subject inversion to occur when: the verb is unaccusative (H1), the subject is long or “heavy” (H2), and the subject is new (or relatively new) information or “focus” (H3). While H1 has found confirmation in the L2 literature, H2 and H3 have, to our knowledge, been untested and the facts they describe gone unnoticed in previous research. Our results show that the three conditions are met in the writing of Spanish and Italian L2 speakers of English, despite errors in the syntactic encoding of the structures concerned. Thus, a full account of the production of inverted subjects in L2 English must look at properties which operate at (i) the lexicon-syntax interface, (ii) the syntax-phonology interface, and (iii) the syntax-discourse interface.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (HUM2005-01278/FILO

On the intricate relation between theory and description: A linguist’s look at The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

On the intricate relation between theory and description: A linguist’s look at The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

English and the good grammarian

The present article reviews some aspects of the content of a new reference grammar of English, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, while reflecting on the process of writing grammars at the beginning of the 2lst century, particularly regarding the relation between theory and description. It is not my goal to offer a comprehensive review of the contents of this grammar, but to examine critically the conceptual framework underlying the linguistic description. For this, I concentrate on the analysis of certain aspects of phrasal and clausal complements of verbs, with particular attention to non-finite (infinitival) subordinate clauses....En este artículo-reseña se examinan algunos aspectos del contenido de una nueva gramática de referencia de la lengua inglesa, The Cambridge Gramnar of the English Language, a la vez que se reflexiona sobre el proceso de elaboración de las gramáticas en los inicios del siglo XXI y, en particular, sobre relación entre la teoría y la descripción. No es nuestro propósito ofrecer un análisis exhaustivo de los contenidos de esta gramática, sino examinar de forma crítica el marco conceptual que subyace a la descripción lingüística. Para ello nos centramos en el análisis de ciertos complementos sintagmáticos y, sobre todo, clausales de los verbos, con..

Competir o colaborar: La Alianza 4 Universidades como ejemplo de asociación estratégica entre universidades públicas españolas

En este artículo de buenas prácticas se detallan los aspectos más importantes de colaboración entre las universidades que forman la Alianza 4 Universidades (A4U), una asociación estratégica entre cuatro universidades públicas jóvenes y líderes en investigación y docencia, situadas en las dos áreas metropolitanas más importantes de España: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) y Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). Esta descripción se centra en las actividades y resultados desarrollados en tres áreas: investigación, relaciones internacionales y docencia. Se destaca especialmente el papel de la A4U en la creación de la red YERUN (Young European Research Universities Network), que reúne a dieciocho universidades europeas de características similares a la A4U, con la que se pretende replicar en el contexto europeo la experiencia de la A4U en España.AbstractThis paper on good practices describes the most important aspects of the collaboration between the universities which belong to the Alliance 4 Universities, a strategic partnership involving four young public universities, which are leaders in research and teaching, and are located in the most important metropolitan areas in Spain: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). The description focuses on its activities and results in three subject areas: research, international relations and teaching.  Special attention is given to the role of A4U in the creation of YERUN (Young European Research Universities Network), an association of eighteen European universities whose profile is similar to that of A4U members. Its aim is to replicate the model of A4U in Spain within the European context

Competir o colaborar: La Alianza 4 Universidades como ejemplo de asociación estratégica entre universidades públicas españolas

This paper on good practices describes the most important aspects of the collaboration between the universities which belong to the Alliance 4 Universities, a strategic partnership involving four young public universities, which are leaders in research and teaching, and are located in the most important metropolitan areas in Spain: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), and Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). The description focuses on its activities and results in three subject areas: research, international relations and teaching. Special attention is given to the role of A4U in the creation of YERUN (Young European Research Universities Network), an association of eighteen European universities whose profile is similar to that of A4U members. Its aim is to replicate the model of A4U in Spain within the European context.En este artículo de buenas prácticas se detallan los aspectos más importantes de colaboración entre las universidades que forman la Alianza 4 Universidades (A4U), una asociación estratégica entre cuatro universidades públicas jóvenes y líderes en investigación y docencia, situadas en las dos áreas metropolitanas más importantes de España: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) y Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF). Esta descripción se centra en las actividades y resultados desarrollados en tres áreas: investigación, relaciones internacionales y docencia. Se destaca especialmente el papel de la A4U en la creación de la red YERUN (Young European Research Universities Network), que reúne a dieciocho universidades europeas de características similares a la A4U, con la que se pretende replicar en el contexto europeo la experiencia de la A4U en España

Exploring word order in learner corpora: The Woslac Project

This presentation reports on work in progress under the framework of a research project investigating word order in Second Language Acquisition (WOSLAC), based on two written learner corpora: WriCLE (L1 Spanish - L2 English) and CEDEL2 (L1 English - L2 Spanish). In the first part of the presentation I will discuss (i) the motivation and objectives of the project, (ii) data collection, (iii) query software and (iv) data analysis. In the second part, I will briefly present the results of a preliminary study on the production of postverbal subjects by Spanish learners of English. The purpose of this three-year project is to determine the properties which constrain word order in the interlanguage of L2 learners of English (with L1 Spanish) and L2 learners of Spanish (with L1 English). We examine both lexicon-syntax and syntax-discourse properties. Word order in English and Spanish differs significantly: in English word order is often said to be �fixed�, while Spanish allows for what is often referred to as �free order�. The two languages differ in the devices they employ to order constituents in the sentence In languages with free word order, information structure properties and discourse properties in general play a crucial role in the position occupied by constituents in sentences, while lexico-syntactic properties mostly determine the ordering of constituents in fixed word order languages. An in-depth investigation into word order in advanced learners of L2 English and L2 Spanish will thus offer answers to questions regarding the relative difficulty of acquiring lexical-syntactic and syntactic-discursive properties, as well as general issues related to L1 transfer and the occurrence of constructions which cannot be attributed to the L1 nor to the target language. Learner corpora are an invaluable tool to explore these issues. Our target is for WriCLE and CEDEL2 to reach 1 million words by the end of the three year period. The corpora will be annotated using UAM CorpusTool, which has been adapted for this study. The tool allows an analyst to select a text from the corpus, and annotate it in various ways. The analyst can highlight a segment (e.g., an it-cleft) and then assign features to that segment. The tool produces an XML-encoded version of the text file, including the features assigned to the segments. Because hand-annotation is slow, the tool will allow the analyst to associate lexico-syntactic patterns with each feature, allowing the tool to automatically detect instances of the pattern. For instance, a pattern like: �it be# NP that� would match sentences in the corpus like �It was John that we saw�, and tentatively mark them with the feature it-cleft. The tool would then ask the user to eliminate false matches. This approach eliminates much of the corpus annotation effort. In the second part of the talk I will present briefly the results in Lozano & Mendikoetxea (in press) - a preliminary study whose purpose is to characterise the production of postverbal subjects in the Italian and Spanish subcorpora of ICLE (Granger et al. 2002). Our approach seeks to identify the conditions under which learners produce inverted subjects, regardless of problems to do with grammaticalition. Our findings reveal that Spanish and Italian learners of L2 English produce postverbal subjects in the same contexts in which these are found in native English, though they show persistent grammaticalisation errors. That is, postverbal subjects are found when (H1) the verb is unaccusative, (H2) the subject is long or �heavy�, and (H3) the subject is new (or relatively new) information or �focus�