Using corpora in SLA research: investigating word order uam.es/woslac

1. Using corpora in SLA research: investigating word order http://www.uam.es/woslac Amaya Mendikoetxea (Project Leader) Cristóbal Lozano (CEDEL2) Michael O’Donnell (UAM CorpusTool) Paul Rollinson (WriCLE) Universidad Autónoma de Madrid • ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & FUNDING • Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, project no. HUM2005-01728FILO • Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid & Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, project no. 09-SHD-01 • MAIN PURPOSE • To analyse properties constraining word order in L2 grammar: • at lexicon-syntax interface • [Unaccusativity Hypothesis] • at syntax-discourse interface • [Topic, Focus] •  WriCLE “Written Corpus of Learner English” (Paul Rollinson) • L1 Spanish – L2 English • TARGET: 1 million words (so far: 600,000 words) • Essays written by 1st and 3rd year • students of English at the Universidad • Autónoma de Madrid • Data gathering: • Learner & Essay profile • Oxford Quick Placement test • CEDEL2 “Corpus Escrito del Español L2” (Cristóbal Lozano) • L1 English – L2 Spanish • TARGET: 1 million words (so far: 500,000 words) • Online data collection (webpage) • Learners from universities all over the world (USA, UK, Australia, Spain) • Data gathering: • Learning background • Spanish Placement Test (Wisconsin) • http://www.uam.es/proyectosinv/woslac/collaborating.htm . http://www.uam.es/woslac/cedel2.htm • SOFTWARE: UAM CorpusTooL 2.0 • (by Michael O’Donnell) • It can select and annotate a structure: text / sentence / phrase / word. • It can assign features to that structure: cleft, passive, preposing, extraposition … • Automatic detection of patterns. • XML format. FREE DOWNLOAD from: http://www.wagsoft.com/CorpusTool/ SOME PUBLICATIONS: Lozano, C. & Mendikoetxea, A. (in press).Postverbal subjects at the interfaces in Spanish and Italian learners of L2 English: a corpus analysis. In: Papp, S., Díez, B. and Gilquin, G. (eds). Linking up contrastive and corpus learner research. Rodopi. Lozano, C. (in press). Selective deficits at the syntax-discourse interface: Evidence from the CEDEL2 corpus. In: Leung, Snape & Sharwood-Smith (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lozano, C. & Mendikoetxea, A. (in press). Verb-Subject order in L2 English: new evidence from the ICLE corpus. In: Actas del XXV Congreso Internacional de AESLA. Universidad de Murcia Lozano, C. & Mendikoetxea, A. (2007). Learner corpora and the acquisition of word order: A study of the production of Verb-Subject structures in L2 English. In: M. Davies, P. Rayson, S, Hunston, P. Danielsson (eds) Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference 2007, University of Birmingham. O'Donnell, M. 2008. "The UAM CorpusTool: Software for corpus annotation and exploration". Proceedings of the XXVI Congreso de AESLA, Almeria, Spain, 3-5 April 2008. O'Donnell, M. 2008. " Demonstration of the UAM CorpusTool for text and image annotation". Proceedings of the ACL-08:HLT Demo Session (CompanionVolume), Columbus, Ohio, June 2008. Association for Computational Linguistics. pages 13–16. Team members: Amaya Mendokoetxea (project leader),´Gema Chocano, Rocío Jiménez, Cristóbal Lozano, Susana Murcia, Michael O’Donnell, Paul Rollinson, Iván Teomiro.