scholarly journals Learners' and native speakers' use of recurrent word-combinations across disciplines

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Signe Oksefjell Ebeling ◽  
Hilde Hasselgård
1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvie De Cock

This article reports on a pilot study into how corpus methods can be applied to the study of one type of phraseological unit, formulae, in native speaker and learner speech. Formulae, or formulaic expressions, are multi-word units performing a pragmatic and/or discourse-structuring function and have been characterised as being typically native-like. The methodology presented here is contrastive and involves the use of computerised corpora of both native and non-native speaker speech. It consists of two steps: (1) the automatic extraction of all recurrent word combinations to produce lists of potential formulae, and (2) a carefully specified manual filtering process designed to reduce these lists to lists of actual formulaic usage. The results of this process allow for the first genuine quantitative comparison of formulae in the speech of native and non-native speakers, which in turn has significant implications for SLA research. This paper focuses on methodology and does not present a full discussion of the results. However, selected example findings are presented to support the approach adopted.


Author(s):  
Isabel Verdaguer ◽  
Judy Noguchi

AbstractThis paper examines the collocational patterns of frequent verbs in medical research articles, and proposes a way to help non-native speakers of English learn word combinations frequently used in specific professional genres. We explore the correlations in the syntactico-semantic behavior and the collocational patterns of related verbs, in order to systematically teach recurrent word combinations.To this end, we present a corpus-based analysis of the collocational patterning of the verbs which belong to the same semantic frame inFrameNet, the frame EVIDENCE. These verbs were identified in 397 medical research articles from a pre-release version of the PERC (Professional English Research Consortium) corpus (3,155,118 tokens and 115,960 word types). The verbs examined, in approximate order of degree of increasing certainty, aresuggest, argue, show, reveal, prove, demonstrate, substantiate, verify, confirmandcorroborate. The results reveal that verbs that can be grouped into semantic and syntactic coherent sets also share combinatorial properties. We conclude that, rather than studying isolated verbs, making learners aware of these patterns of verb groups can greatly contribute toward efficient learning of the language of professional texts.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serpil Ucar

The utilization of English recurrent word combinations –lexical bundles- play a fundamental role in academic prose (Karabacak & Qin, 2013). There has been highly limited research about comparing Turkish non-native and native English writers’ use of lexical bundles in academic prose in terms of frequency, structure and functions of lexical bundles (Bal, 2010; Karabacak & Qin, 2013, Öztürk, 2014). Therefore, this current research was conducted in order to investigate the most frequently used lexical bundles in the academically published articles of Turkish non-native and native speakers of English and to investigate whether there was a significant difference between native and non-native scholars with respect to the frequency, structures and functions of English language lexical bundles. The data were collected from two corpora; 15 scientific articles of native speakers and 15 scientific articles of Turkish advanced writers. The investigation included a quantitative analysis of the use of three-word lexical bundles and a qualitative analysis of the functions and structures they serve. To be more conservative, three-word lexical bundles which occur 40 times per million words and appear in 5 different texts were described a lexical bundle in this current research. The findings revealed that Turkish non-native writers showed underuse and less variation in the use of lexical bundles in their academic prose compared to native speakers.


Author(s):  
Sandra Godinho ◽  
Margarida V. Garrido ◽  
Oleksandr V. Horchak

Abstract. Words whose articulation resembles ingestion movements are preferred to words mimicking expectoration movements. This so-called in-out effect, suggesting that the oral movements caused by consonantal articulation automatically activate concordant motivational states, was already replicated in languages belonging to Germanic (e.g., German and English) and Italic (e.g., Portuguese) branches of the Indo-European family. However, it remains unknown whether such preference extends to the Indo-European branches whose writing system is based on the Cyrillic rather than Latin alphabet (e.g., Ukrainian), or whether it occurs in languages not belonging to the Indo-European family (e.g., Turkish). We replicated the in-out effect in two high-powered experiments ( N = 274), with Ukrainian and Turkish native speakers, further supporting an embodied explanation for this intriguing preference.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-54
Author(s):  
Irmala Sukendra ◽  
Agus Mulyana ◽  
Imam Sudarmaji

Regardless to the facts that English is being taught to Indonesian students starting from early age, many Indonesian thrive in learning English. They find it quite troublesome for some to acquire the language especially to the level of communicative competence. Although Krashen (1982:10) states that “language acquirers are not usually aware of the fact that they are acquiring language, but are only aware of the fact that they are using the language for communication”, second language acquisition has several obstacles for learners to face and yet the successfulness of mastering the language never surmounts to the one of the native speakers. Learners have never been able to acquire the language as any native speakers do. Mistakes are made and inter-language is unavoidable. McNeili in Ellis (1985, p. 44) mentions that “the mentalist views of L1 acquisition hypothesizes the process of acquisition consists of hypothesis-testing, by which means the grammar of the learner’s mother tongue is related to the principles of the ‘universal grammar’.” Thus this study intends to find out whether the students go through the phase of interlanguage in their attempt to acquire second language and whether their interlanguage forms similar system as postulated by linguists (Krashen).


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 187-204
Author(s):  
Tomás Espino Barrera

The dramatic increase in the number of exiles and refugees in the past 100 years has generated a substantial amount of literature written in a second language as well as a heightened sensibility towards the progressive loss of fluency in the mother tongue. Confronted by what modern linguistics has termed ‘first-language attrition’, the writings of numerous exilic translingual authors exhibit a deep sense of trauma which is often expressed through metaphors of illness and death. At the same time, most of these writers make a deliberate effort to preserve what is left from the mother tongue by attempting to increase their exposure to poems, dictionaries or native speakers of the ‘dying’ language. The present paper examines a range of attitudes towards translingualism and first language attrition through the testimonies of several exilic authors and thinkers from different countries (Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Hannah Arendt's interviews, Jorge Semprún's Quel beau dimanche! and Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez, and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, among others). Special attention will be paid to the historical frameworks that encourage most of their salvaging operations by infusing the mother tongue with categories of affect and kinship.


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