This paper is the first to examine the motivational disposition of Nepalese learners of L2 English. Based on an adapted version of the questionnaire in (Kormos, Judit & Kata Csizér. 2008. Age-related differences in motivation of learning English as a foreign language: Attitudes, selves, and motivated behavior. Language Learning 58. 327–355. Doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2008.00443.x.), we test the robustness and culture-specific applicability of well-known motivational antecedents to this learner population, and we investigate how the effects of these antecedents are mediated by the learners’ gender, age and regional aspects of the educational setting. In doing so, we offer novel ways of analyzing the data: Firstly, we employ random forests and conditional inference trees for assessing the relative importance of motivational antecedents. Secondly, we complement the traditional ‘scale-based approach’, which focuses on holistic constructs like the ‘Ideal L2 Self’, with an ‘item-based approach’ that highlights more specific components of such scales. The results are interpreted with reference to the L2 Motivational Self System (Dörnyei, Zoltán. 2005. The psychology of the language learner: Individual differences in second language acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) and to previous studies on other Asian populations of L2 learners.
This paper provides a corpus-linguistic, usage-based approach to the acquisition of be-going-to-V and be-gonna-V. Based on longitudinal data from two American children, it is argued that the constructions develop on the basis of several low-level chunks of varying degrees of morphosyntactic complexity. I propose an empirical way of grouping these chunks according to their structural and developmental properties, which allows us to trace how constructional networks emerge, expand and change in early childhood. In addition, this method reveals insights into the way the historically transmitted layering of the constructions is accessed in language acquisition. In particular, I uncover and account for apparent 'grammaticalization e¤ects' in child speech, and discuss the relationship between acquisition and change in the cognitive-functional paradigm. . Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Daniel Wiechmann, Holger Diessel and three anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful comments and suggestions on the paper. Special thanks go to Katja Hetterle for checking on coding reliability, and to Stefan Th. Gries for providing and discussing several algorithms used in this paper. The usual disclaimers apply. Brought to you by | University of Birmingham Authenticated Download Date | 5/30/15 7:52 AM Brought to you by | University of Birmingham Authenticated Download Date | 5/30/15 7:52 AM 10. The opposite perspective, i.e., that in historical grammaticalization, adult members of a speech community ''are 'recapitulating' developmental processes from early childhood'', was already forcefully refuted by Slobin (1994: 128).going-to-V and gonna-V in child language 531Brought to you by | University of Birmingham Authenticated Download Date | 5/30/15 7:52 AM
Using data from the World Atlas of Language Structures and the Universal Dependencies treebanks, we provide converging evidence from linguistic typology and comparative corpus linguistics for an efficiency-based trade-off in the encoding of referentially accessible subjects. Specifically, when familiar subjects are marked as bound elements attaching to the verb, the chances of having obligatory independent subject pronouns decrease significantly across the world's languages. At the same time, there is a trend against not encoding the subject at all, leading us to postulate an overall tendency to encode familiar subjects once and only once in a neutral topiccomment utterance. This tendency is mirrored in more fine-grained corpus data from Slavic: East Slavic languages, in contrast to the other members of the genus, have past forms without verbal subject encoding, and it is precisely with these (former participle) forms that the use of independent subject pronouns is significantly higher than with other, non-participial verb forms. By contrast, the occurrence of independent subject pronouns does not differ across various verb forms in other Slavic languages, as none of them has been affected by a loss of verbal subject encoding.
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