Three conditions for Verb-Subject order in non-native English: A corpus-based study

1. Three conditions for Verb-Subject order in non-native English: A corpus-based study TALC7 Université Paris 7 – Denis Diderot 3rd July 2006 Amaya Mendikoetxeaamaya.mendikoetxea@uam.es Cristóbal Lozanocristobal.lozano@uam.es Universidad Autónoma de Madrid http://www.uam.es/woslac

2. THE STUDY • Postverbal subjects • L1 Spa – L2 Eng • ICLE corpus • Interfaces • Lexicon-syntax • Syntax-discourse

3. THE “WOSLAC” PROJECT“Word Order in Second Language Acquisition Corpora” • MAIN PURPOSE: • To determine the lexicon-syntax and syntax-discourse properties which constrain word order in the interlanguage of L2 learner corpora • L2 English (with L1 Spanish) • L2 Spanish (with L1 English). • To examine the validity of: • the Unaccusative Hypothesis at the lexicon-syntax interface and • the role of discourse functions such as topic and focus at the syntax-discourse interface in L2 Spanish and English.

4. Word order in native English • Very restricted: canonical word order SV. • Four girls sang • Four girls arrived • Lexicon-syntax interface (Levin & Rappaport-Hovav, etc): • Unaccusative Hypothesis (Burzio 1986, etc) • *There sang four girls at the opera. • There arrived four girls at the station. • Syntax-discourse interface (Biber et al, Birner, etc): • Postverbal material tends to be focus (new info) • We have complimentary soft drinks and coffee. Also complimentary is red and white wine. • Syntax-Phonological Form (PF) interface (Arnold et al, etc) • Heavy material is sentence-final (Principle of End-Weight, Quirk): • That money is important is obvious. • It is obvious that money is important.

5. Word order in native Spanish • Lexicon-syntax interface: • Syntax-discourse interface: UNACCUSATIVES: SV A: Qué pasó? B: Llegó un hombre [VS] UNERGATIVES: SV A: Qué pasó? B: Un hombre gritó [SV] UNERGATIVES A: Quién gritó? B: Gritó un hombre [VS] UNACCUSATIVES A: Quién llegó? B: Llegó un hombre [VS] • Theoretical evidence: Zubizarreta 1998, Casielles-Suárez 2004, Domínguez 2004 • Empirical evidence: Hertel 2000, 2003, Lozano 2003, 2006

6. Main purpose • To characterise the interlanguage of advanced learners (L1 Spa – L2 Eng) • by examining their production of both grammatical and ungrammatical VS structures: • …and here emerges the problem. • *In the name of religion it had occurred many important events.

7. Hypotheses • VS order in L1 Spa – L2 Eng… • GENERAL HYPOTHESIS: • Conditions licensing VS in L2 Eng are the same as those in Native Eng, DESPITE differences in grammaticalisation. • H1: Lexicon-syntax interface: • Postverbal subjects with unaccs (never with unergs) • H2: Syntax-PF interface: • Postverbal subjects: heavy(NOT light) • H3: Syntax-Discourse interface: • Postverbal subjects: focus (NOT topic)

8. Previous L2 findings • Production of postverbal subjects in L2 English (Rutherford 1989, Oshita 2004): • L1 Spanish – L2 English: • …it arrived the day of his departure… • And then at last comes the great day. • In every country exist criminals • …after a few minutes arrive the girlfriend with his family too. • Only with unaccusativeverbs (never with unergatives). • Unaccusatives: arrive, happen, exist, come, appear, live… • Explanation: syntax-lexicon interface (Unaccusative Hypothesis) Previous studies focused on ERRORS, thus emphasising the differences between native and non-native structures. Our study emphasises the similarities between native and non-native structures  licesing conditions are the same.

9. Method • Learner corpus: L1 Spa – L2 Eng • ICLE Spanish subcorpus (Granger et al. 2002) • UAM corpus [2nd edition of ICLE] • Problem: proficiency level?? • WordSmith v. 4.0 (Scott 2004) • Excel, SPSS v. 12.0 •  Concordance queries can be performed automatically with WordSmith, BUT there is a lot of manual work (filtering out unusable data, coding data in Excel, analysing data in SPSS, etc).

10. The data • From Levin (1993) and Levin & Rappaport-Hovav (1995):

11. WordSmith: query searches: • For every lemma (e.g., APPEAR, ARISE), we searched for: • All possible native forms: • appear, appears, appearing, appeared • arise, arises, arising, arose, arisen • All posible overregularised and overgeneralised learner forms: • arised, arosed,arisened, arosened (“So arised the Sain Inquisition”) • All possible forms with probable L1 transfer of spelling: • apear, apears, apearing, apeared • All other possible misspelled forms: • appeard, apeard

12. Wordsmith Concordances • 3300 concordances approx: • 820 usable concordances (1/4) . • Filtering criteria manually.

13. Filtering criteria • MAIN FILTERING CRITERIA: • The verb must be intransitive (unergative or unaccusative). • The verb must be finite, active voice. • The subject can appear either postverbally (VS) or preverbally (SV). • The subject must be an NP. • The sentence can be either grammatical or ungrammatical in native English. • OTHER FILTERING CRITERIA (TOTAL=28)

14. Data coding/analysis: EXCEL

15. Data analysis: preliminary descriptive stats - EXCEL

16. Data analysis – inferential stats: SPSS

17. Types of VS structures produced:grammatical & ungrammatical • Locative inversion: • In the main plot appear the main characters: Volpone and Mosca. • There-insertion: • There exist positive means of earning money. • AdvP-insertion: • … and here emerges the problem. • * it-insertion: • *In the name of religion it had occurred many important events… • * XP-insertion: • *In 1760 occurs the restoration of Charles II in England. • * Ø-insertion: • …*because exist the science technology and the industrialisation. GRAMM. UNGRAM.

18. H1: Results: VS and unaccusativity

19. H2: Result: VS and weight Syntactic weight has to be measured manually according to some theoretical criteria HEAVY Against this society drama emerged an opposition headed by Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw. …so came the decline of the theatre. Then come the necessity to earn more. LIGHT So arised the Saint Inquisition… …and from there began a fire. Still today … exists the bloody fights.

20. H2: Result: SV and weight HEAVY …the cases of men mistreated do not appear in the media… …a disintegration of culture, tradition and society would begin… …the utopian societies created by the early socialists appeared. LIGHT …but they may appear everywhere. …since the day eventually came… …these people should exist, …

21. H3: Result: VS and discourse Discourse status (topic/focus) has to be measured manually by establishing theoretical criteria and then by checking the context (or even the essay) manually FOCUS …there also exists a wide variety of optional channels which have to be paid. So arised the Saint Inquisition. In 1880 it begun the experiments whose result was the appearance of the television some years later. TOPIC …our modern world, dominated by science and technology and industrialisation …because exist the science technology and the industrialisation.

22. H3: Result: SV and discourse TOPIC I use the Internet … I find windows … if they press on any of these windows … these windows cannot appear because a child could enter easily… …the world of drugs: mafias … problems with mafias finished … dangerous people making money … no reason why these people should exist.

23. Conclusion V S Lexicon-syntax Vunacc NPsubj Syntax-discourse FOCUS Syntax-PF HEAVY NPsubj Vunacc Syntax-discourse TOPIC Syntax-PF LIGHT S V

24. THANK YOU!

25. SUMMARY • The main purpose of this study is to determine the lexicon-syntax, syntax-discourse and syntax-phonology properties which constrain Verb-Subject (VS) word order in the interlanguage of L2 learners of English (with L1 Spanish). • Previous studies have found only onecondition on postverbal subjects in L2 English: the subject must appear with unaccusatives. • We show that there are three conditions determining advanced learners´ production of VS (=postverbal subjects), which are the same as those in native English. • In particular, we hypothesised postverbal subjects to appear: • H1: with unaccusative verbs. • H2: when the subject is heavy. • H3: when the subject is focus. • These hypotheses were tested with data from a learner corpus (L1 Spa – L2 Eng). • Results confirm the hypotheses.

26. REFERENCES • Arnold, J.E., Wasow, T., Losongco, A. and Ginstrom, R., 2000. Heaviness vs. newness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering. Language 76, 28-55. • Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., and Finegan, E., 1999. LongmanGrammar of Spoken and Written English (chapter 11). Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. • Birner, B.J., 1994. Information status and word order: An analysis of English inversion. Language 70, 233-259. • Birner, B.J., 1995. Pragmatic constraints on the verb in English inversion. Lingua 97, 233-256. • Birner, B.J. and Ward, G., 1996. A crosslinguistic study of postposing in discourse. Language and Speech 39, 113-142. • Bresnan, 1994. Locative inversion and the architecture of Universal Grammar. Language 70, 71-131. • Burzio, L., 1986. Italian Syntax: A Government-Binding Approach. Dordrecht: Reidel. • de Miguel, E., 1993. Construcciones ergativas e inversión en la lengua y la interlengua española. 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27. Examples of production • Mostly S-V: 93% • The real problem appears when they have to look for their first job. • …these people should exist. • But many V-S (58 in total): 7% • There exist positive means of earning money. • So arised the Saint Inquisition. • In the main plot appear the main characters: Volpone and Mosca. • *…it has appeared some cases of women that have killed their husbands. • *…and from this moment begins the avarice. • *…and appeared a lot more theatres.

28. H1: Result: VS and specific unaccusative verbs