Longitudinal Corpus Research Articles

Australian English over Time: Using Sociolinguistic Analysis to Inform Dialect Coaching

ABSTRACT Depictions of Australian English in theater and film by non-Australian performers are often met with negative public reactions by Australian audiences. This partially stems from misconceptions about Australian vowel pronunciations (e.g., that mate and might are homophones); however, there is also a general lack of awareness about how Australian English has changed over time. Research in dialect coaching has long argued that dialect practitioners and learners must have sociolinguistic awareness of the phonetic reality of the dialect being represented. This paper is a resource to assist in the development of such awareness. Research methods from sociolinguistics and phonetics are applied to provide a detailed description of Australian English vowels as evidenced in a large, longitudinal corpus of spontaneous speech data. The corpus captures the speech of 95 Anglo-Celtic Australians in Australia’s largest city, Sydney, and includes recordings made at two points in time (1970s and 2010s) with speakers born between 1914 and 1999. The empirical description of vowel productions over time presented here provides a guide for dialect coaches and performers alike for application in their work with Australian English.

Initial observations on complex predicates in Qaqet children’s language

This article focuses on complex predicates in Qaqet, a Papuan (Baining) language of Papua New Guinea, spoken by 15,000 people and still being acquired monolingually in remote areas. A large part of the Qaqet verb lexicon is compositional, consisting of simple verb roots that combine with prepositions or particles/suffixes, jointly contributing to the overall meaning of the expression. While patterns can be discerned, the resulting meanings are only partly transparent, thus presenting challenges to the language learner. This article is a first study tracing the distribution of these complex expressions in Qaqet children’s speech, drawing on a subset (31 hours) of a longitudinal corpus of children aged 2–6 (with a focus on the ages 2–4). The Qaqet complex verbs are reminiscent of West Germanic prefix and particle verbs (such as uncover and cover up), and this study therefore takes Heike Behrens’ pioneering study as its point of reference.

Do representations of gender and profession change over time? Insights from a longitudinal corpus study on Dutch language textbooks (1974–2017)

ABSTRACT Studies on English language textbooks indicate that, with some exceptions, women are underrepresented and appear in low-status professions. To what degree do these findings apply to textbooks for Dutch as a Second Language (DSL) learners? To our knowledge, there are no studies into gender and profession in DSL materials. Dutch, however, constitutes an interesting, culture-specific case as both female, male and gender neutral professional role nouns exist, but their use is not formally regulated. We systematically analysed textual and pictorial representations of fe/male professionals in chapters about work in 15 DSL textbooks published within the last 50 years. Results suggest that women are not underrepresented in dialogues and pictures but are backgrounded through male firstness. Female professional names appear less frequently than male names and women are described in gender typical roles, whereas men are not. This holds for both older (1974–2009) and recent materials (2011–2017). Overall, more gender neutral nouns refer to men, but they have been used more frequently within the last decade to refer to women. Future studies should add psycholinguistic and classroom perspectives and consider additional foci. We discuss pedagogical implications for those with concern for gender equality in learning materials.

Cognition in construction grammar: Connecting individual and community grammars

AbstractThis paper examines, on the basis of a longitudinal corpus of 50 early modern authors, how change at the aggregate level of the community interacts with variation and change at the micro-level of the individual language user. In doing so, this study aims to address the methodological gap between collective change and entrenchment, that is, the gap between language as a social phenomenon and the cognitive processes responsible for the continuous reorganization of linguistic knowledge in individual speakers. Taking up the case of the prepositional passive, this study documents a strong community-wide increase in use that is accompanied by increasing schematicity. A comparison of the 50 authors reveals that regularities arising at the macro-level conceal highly complex and variable individual behavior, aspects of which may be explained by studying the larger (social) context in which these individuals operate (e. g., age cohorts, community of practice, biographical insights). Further analysis, focusing on how authors use the prepositional passive in unique and similar ways, elucidates the role of small individual biases in long-term change. Overall, it is demonstrated that language change is an emergent phenomenon that results from the complex interaction between individual speakers, who themselves may change their linguistic behavior to varying degrees.

The Longitudinal Development of Grammatical Complexity at the Phrasal and Clausal Levels in Spoken and Written Responses to the TOEFL iBT® Test

In the present study, we take a longitudinal, corpus‐based perspective to investigate short‐term (over 9 months) linguistic change in the language produced for the spoken and written sections of the TOEFL iBT® test by a group of English‐as‐a‐foreign‐language (EFL) learners in China. The goal of the study is to identify patterns that characterize the trajectory that language learners move through in terms of their use of phrasal and clausal grammatical complexity, as mediated by mode (spoken and written) and task type (independent and integrated). Results of a multidimensional analysis reveal that in many cases, learners developed in expected ways: discourse styles at Time 1 were not always aligned with mode‐ and task type‐specific discourse patterns but developed over time, with discourse styles at Time 2 better approximating expected norms and exhibiting increased task differentiation. These changes were particularly noteworthy for Dimension 1, which is related to phrasal and clausal complexity. Results of a developmental complexity analysis revealed more mixed results, seeming to indicate that the relatively low‐proficiency learners represented by the longitudinal corpus may just be beginning on the hypothesized paths of development. The most important developments occurred for independent writing, in which students exhibited increases in the frequency of phrasal features, as well as functional expansion in the use of a range of complexity features.

Systematicity in linguistic feature selection: Repair sequences and subsequent accommodation

AbstractThis study examines linguistic feature selection and its relationship with repair sequences in a longitudinal corpus of Japanese–Filipino business ELF interactions. In the corpus, Japanese employees communicate once a month with Filipino employees via computer software to confirm infrastructure status at a Filipino company’s factories. Comparative constructions frequently appear in the corpus because of the nature of the interactions, but the kinds and frequencies of comparative constructions change month to month. This study demonstrates that early in the corpus, the speakers utilized a multitude of comparative constructions, but after 12 months, the speakers have settled on one preferred comparative construction. Furthermore, the preferred construction emerged from repair sequences, which suggests that repair is significantly related to linguistic feature selection. Accordingly, this study hypothesizes that repair sequences do far more than just resolve an interactional problem; repaired linguistic features are more likely to be selected again the next time a similar linguistic feature is relevant to the progression of the interaction.

한국어 학습자의 조사 연속체 사용 연구 : 초급 학습자의 구어 발화 분석을 바탕으로

한국어 학습자의 조사 연속체 사용 연구 : 초급 학습자의 구어 발화 분석을 바탕으로

The Litkey Corpus: A richly annotated longitudinal corpus of German texts written by primary school children.

Compared to early language development, later changes to the language system during orthography and literacy acquisition have not yet been researched in detail. We present a longitudinal corpus of texts on short picture stories written by German primary school children between grades 2 and 4 and grades 3 and 4. It includes 1,922 texts with 212,505 tokens (6,364 types) from 251 children. For each text, rich metadata is available, including age, grade and linguistic background (at least 60% of the children were multilingual). To our knowledge, our corpus is the largest longitudinal corpus of written texts by children at primary school age. Each word is included in its original spelling as well as in a normalized form (target hypothesis), specifying the intended word form, which we corrected for orthographic but not grammatical errors. Original and target word forms are aligned character-wise and the target word forms are enriched with phonological, syllabic, and morphological information. Additionally, for each target word form, we established key lexical variables, e.g., word frequency or summed bigram frequency, as specified in childLex. Where applicable, we also specify key features of German orthography (e.g., consonant doubling, vowel-lengthening <h>). Taken together, this information allows for a detailed assessment of the properties of words that tend to increase the likelihood of spelling errors. The corpus is available in different formats-as tab-delimited annotated token and type based lists, in an XML format, and via the corpus search tool ANNIS.

Development of Verb Morphology: From Item-Specificity to Proficient Use

The initial phase of linguistic production by children is char- acterized by rote-learned, lexically restricted forms and con- structions. Only during later phases of language acquisition do they develop flexibility across a paradigm and mix lexical and grammatical material more freely. In the development of verb morphology, a correlation between the use of tense and aspect has been observed in many languages. It has been sug- gested that this leads to an intermediary state of paradigm cat- egorization based on temporal categories. So far the flexibility of individual verbs occurring in different tense-aspect combi- nations has not been examined in detail. Here we evaluate the flexibility of verb use in a large longitudinal corpus of 4 Rus- sian children. We compute the Shannon entropy of verb stems distributed over individual grammatical forms. Results show that children do not pass through a stage of paradigm cate- gorization based on aspecto-temporal categories. After a brief item-specific phase of rote learned forms, they quickly become flexible users of verbs in both aspects.

Grammaticalization and the linguistic individual: new avenues in lifespan research

AbstractThis paper reviews theoretical and methodological advances and issues in lifespan research and discusses how the issues at stake are addressed in an ongoing research project. Summarizing the state of the art, we conclude that next to nothing is known about lifespan changes affecting syntactic or grammaticalizing constructions that goes beyond exploratory or anecdotal evidence. TheMind-Bending Grammarsproject, which examines the adaptive powers of adult cognition and constraints on these powers, aspires to make headway in this area. In this paper, we introduce some of the major goals of the project and present a new large-scale longitudinal corpus of 50 adults that was established to study grammatical change across the lifespan. Particular attention is paid to the constraints on the adoption of novel grammatical patterns in the aging mind. Takingbe going toas a case study, we present evidence that (highly educated) healthy monolingual speakers continue to participate in grammatical innovations across the lifespan.

How large should a dense corpus be for reliable studies in early language acquisition ?

Dense corpora have been put forward as necessary tools for corpus studies of language acquisition. Despite their great interest, they are not yet frequently used, probably because of the high cost involved in their creation. The goal of the present study was to predict the optimal size of a dense longitudinal corpus when used to infer, manually or automatically, the details of lexical or syntactic development in child language. The results show that corpora of at least 30 to 40 one-hour recordings are necessary, but that longer corpora using the same protocol provide little new information. Dense corpora are indeed very useful, but do not need to be overly large to study grammatical development. This has important consequences for corpus-building projects, which can be optimized. The existence of a limit to the amount of information provided by large corpora also has important consequences for linguistic theory, as this helps locate the threshold between learning frozen forms and generalizing knowledge about language structure.

A study of the texts in the TRAWL corpus of lower secondary schools reveals the visibility of the writer and reader in young learners' writing

According to the findings of one study that used a learner corpus, advanced students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) frequently make errors in the usage of interactional WRV components in their written academic papers. I believe inquiries, first- and second-person pronouns, modal adverbs, and modal auxiliaries are all included in this category of characteristics. The findings of learner corpus research lead to this widely accepted and acknowledged conclusion. On the other hand, there hasn't been much study conducted on elementary and secondary school students. The primary objective of this research is to study WRV characteristics in argumentative and explanatory genres within the TRAWL longitudinal corpus of learner texts from Norwegian lower secondary schools using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research approaches. Expository, argumentative, and hybrid writing are all types of writing that fall under this category. ICLE-NO, the Norwegian adaptation of the exam, is utilized to compare levels that have progressed in their growth (undergraduate students at universities).&#x0D; According to the findings, students who take TRAWL are more likely to include WRV features in their writing, with allusions to first-person views being particularly widespread among these students' contributions (with I dominating). The students who are enrolled in TRAWL have less experience than those who are enrolled in ICLE-NO, and as a result, they commonly abuse a range of features. Nevertheless, this is not the case for every TRAWL student. The fact that the prompts, whether argumentative or explanatory, typically look for a personal style is one explanation for the high frequency of WRV in TRAWL. Other possible explanations include: The following are some more reasons that might be applicable: There are particular explanation prompts and messages that are less personal, but other than that, there is not much difference between the genres. Consequently, teachers must be more specific about the genres they want their students to generate and provide them with more necessary prompts without imposing any particular writing style on them. In addition, they will need to provide their students with more opportunities to write.

Understanding the language of entrepreneurship

Purpose Entrepreneurship is an activity with far-reaching economic and cultural implications. Research seeking to understand the cognition and behavior of entrepreneurs is devoting increasing attention to how entrepreneurs construct and utilize discourse. However, word-level analysis of the specific language used by entrepreneurs has not received significant attention. The purpose of this paper is to identify the words that comprise entrepreneurship discourse and describe how word-usage has changed over time. Design/methodology/approach To examine the language of entrepreneurship, the authors use modified MapReduce algorithms in conjunction with text mining techniques to construct a longitudinal corpus of approximately 2.5m words. The authors identify the most frequently used words in the entrepreneurship lexicon and then use content analysis to chart the evolution of word-use. Findings The findings reveal that entrepreneurs’ lexicon is complex and fluid. The most commonly used words suggest new trends in entrepreneurship. Originality/value The findings and methodological procedures contribute to research on entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial process and, specifically, to work on entrepreneurial discourse, language-use and new venture communication. The findings also have implications for entrepreneurs and policymakers.

Co-adaptation processes in plenary teacher-student talk and the development of L2 interactional competence

ABSTRACT This paper shows how a language teacher and her students observably recalibrate their interactional behaviour over time. With respect to the students, this recalibration can be interpreted as increased L2 interactional competence. The participants’ turn designs indicate that they are contingent upon: 1) the local interactional context; 2) the students’ changing linguistic and interactional competence; and 3) the teacher’s evolving pedagogical goals. The phenomenon is examined in oral collective reconstructions of reading texts in plenary teacher-student talk. The data stems from a longitudinal corpus of video-recorded classroom interaction, distributed over 5 schoolyears of instructed L3 French. The analysis focuses on the way the teacher’s questions, the students’ responses and the teacher’s subsequent third turns are formatted with regard to the use of linguistic resources afforded by the reading texts. At the pre-intermediate level, the teacher invites and reinforces the use of afforded linguistic elements, while the students’ answer turns are characterized by appropriations of linguistic resources from the teacher’s talk or the reading text. Towards the intermediate level, the teacher’s turns increasingly reflect a changing pedagogical agenda allowing for more learner agency, while the students’ turns exhibit a more fine-tuned recipient design despite fewer afforded elements.

Mastering the Grammar of Complex Events: Evidence from Mandarin Resultative Verb Compounds

ABSTRACTThe Mandarin resultative verb compound (RVC; e.g., tui dao “push fall” and pa shang “climb ascend”) encodes complex events composed of an initiating action and resulting activity or state. This study investigated when Mandarin-speaking children acquired this language-specific device. Specifically, we focused on children’s production of RVCs with two infixes, -bu- “not able” and -de- “be able.” Because the infixes intervene between the two verbs of RVC (e.g., tui -bu- dao “push -not able- fall” and tui -de- dao “push -be able- fall”), being able to produce RVC infixation indicates that children have a morphological separation between the action and the result verbs. Two studies were conducted. Study 1 is a corpus analysis. We examined the use of plain RVCs versus RVCs with infixes in parent input and children’s spontaneous speech using a cross-sectional corpus and a longitudinal corpus. RVCs with infixes were found to be very rare in both parent input and child production. Study 2 is an experimental elicitation task targeting RVC infixation. Children between 3;0 and 5;0 performed exceptionally well, producing target responses when primed with structurally related probes in discourse-appropriate contexts. There was no difference in children’s performance related to age or the type of infix (i.e., -bu- vs -de-). Children’s early competence with RVC infixation, which is infrequent in input, runs counter to the usage-based approach that emphasizes item-based learning. Rather, by age three, Mandarin-speaking children have developed a representation of the RVC as two distinct morphemes for encoding complex event structure. This representation facilitates acquisition of the infixes with very little input data.

Analyzing Knowledge Retrieval Impairments Associated with Alzheimer's Disease Using Network Analyses.

A defining characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease is difficulty in retrieving semantic memories, or memories encoding facts and knowledge. While it has been suggested that this impairment is caused by a degradation of the semantic store, the precise ways in which the semantic store is degraded are not well understood. Using a longitudinal corpus of semantic fluency data (listing of items in a category), we derive semantic network representations of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and of healthy controls. We contrast our network-based approach with analyzing fluency data with the standard method of counting the total number of items and perseverations in fluency data. We find that the networks of Alzheimer’s patients are more connected and that those connections are more randomly distributed than the connections in networks of healthy individuals. These results suggest that the semantic memory impairment of Alzheimer’s patients can be modeled through the inclusion of spurious associations between unrelated concepts in the semantic store. We also find that information from our network analysis of fluency data improves prediction of patient diagnosis compared to traditional measures of the semantic fluency task.

Learning to evaluate through that-clauses: Evidence from a longitudinal learner corpus

The language of evaluation in academic writing has been increasingly studied. However, little is known about how students learn to make evaluative meanings. This article reports on a study of evaluative that-clauses based on a longitudinal corpus of 632 argumentative essays by 158 Chinese undergraduate students. The findings of the study show a non-linear trajectory of change in the use of evaluative that-clauses over time. It was found that the proportion of verb that-clauses decreased whereas the proportions of noun that-clauses and adjective that-clauses increased. Further, while the range of the lexical words co-occurring with evaluative that-clauses expanded, the authorial visibility in stance expression decreased. These changes indicate signs of agency and suggest that the development of evaluative language resources is an organic, dynamic process. Overall the study points to the value of developing and exploring longitudinal learner corpora for studying language learning in general and development in evaluative language in particular. Taking an approach to treating learner language in its own right, the study further contributes to a small but growing body of research based on an empowering ideology and to the empirical literature on evaluation and language learning. Implications for writing instruction are considered.

Hearing me hearing you: Reciprocal effects between child and parent language in autism and typical development

Language development in typically developing children (TD) has traditionally been investigated in relation to environmental factors, while language in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has primarily been related to child-based factors. We employ a longitudinal corpus of 32 preschoolers with ASD and 35 linguistically matched TD peers recorded over 6 visits (ranging between 2 and 5 years of age) to investigate the relative importance of child-based and environmental factors in language development for both populations. We also investigate the reciprocal interaction between children’s response to parents’ input, and parents’ response to children’s production. We report six major findings. (1) Children’s production of word types, tokens, and MLU increased across visits, and were predicted by their Expressive Language (EL) (positively) and diagnosis (negatively) from Visit 1. (2) Parents’ production also increased across visits, and was predicted by their child’s nonverbal cognition (positively) and diagnosis (negatively) from Visit 1. (3) At all visits and across groups, children and parents matched each other in lexical and syntactic production; (4) Parents who produced longer MLUs during a given visit had children who produced more word types and tokens, and had longer MLUs, at the subsequent visit. (5) When both child EL at Visit 1 and parent MLU were included in the model, both contributed significantly to future child language; however, EL accounted for a greater proportion of the variance. (6) Finally, children’s speech significantly predicted parent speech at the next visit. Taken together, these results draw more attention to the importance of child-based factors in the early language development of TD children, and to the importance of parental language factors in the early language development of children with ASD.

Register analysis and ESP pedagogy: Noun-phrase modification in a corpus of English for military navy submariners

Research in Maritime English (ME) has paid no attention to the range of texts and language to which Navy submariners are exposed during their training and professional careers. This research looked at Noun Phrase (NP)modification patterns in a longitudinal corpus of Submarine English (SE) professional texts in the Cartagena Military Submarine Corpus (CMSC). Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, we found that SE is characterised by heavy nominal premodification, low adjective premodification, low prepositional phrase postmodification and by the predominant use of appositive nouns in postmodifying slots. These distinctive features of SE call for a register-sensitive pedagogy that unpack these characteristics and present them in context. We argue that the contribution of corpus linguistics is essential to explore registers which, for different reasons, have not been addressed or described linguistically in the past. Similarly, we maintain that the examination and teaching of NPs is essential to understand current trends in professional writing and communication.

The development of phrasal complexity in German intermediate learners of English

AbstractOn the basis of a longitudinal corpus of English produced by German intermediate learners, the present paper explores how noun phrase (NP) complexity develops in terms of global measures of complexity (length, number of modifiers per 1,000 words) in learner data on an intermediate level of competence and describes how the use of individual NP-modification structures changes as learners progress through their three final years of secondary school. An additional objective is to testBiber et al.’s (2011)hypothesized stages of acquisition against our data of intermediate learner English, complementing the data of advanced learner English provided byParkinson &amp; Musgrave (2014). Our results show that global measures of NP complexity remain stable as learners progress from grades 10 to 12. Zooming in on individual learners and features, the results lend tentative support toBiber et al.’s (2011)stages of acquisition. However, individual variation influences the frequency of noun-phrasal modifiers.