This article studies the use of support verb constructions (SVCs) in the written production of learners of Spanish. SVCs are lexical combinations whose content is similar to verbal predicates but is distributed between a verb and a noun, the noun being the carrier of the core lexical meaning of the predicate. Although there is considerable agreement on the importance of these constructions in the learning process, their use in the production of learners of Spanish has so far attracted little attention. This study examines the difficulties posed to learners by this construction by means of a qualitative analysis of the errors registered in 3 samples consisting of essays by learners with 3 different mother tongues (English, Swedish, and Japanese). It focuses on 3 types of error, 2 of which—the support verb choice and the determiner choice—seem to be especially problematic due to the unpredictability of the units involved. The third type—using an SVC instead of a more idiomatic 1‐word verb—is regularly found only in the samples of the Japanese speakers, which suggests the influence of a particular mother tongue in its production.

No abstract

This paper presents a new strategy for multilingual collocation extraction which takes advantage of parallel corpora to learn bilingual word-embeddings. Monolingual collocation candidates are retrieved using Universal Dependencies, while the distributional models are then applied to search for equivalents of the elements of each collocation in the target languages. The proposed method extracts not only collocation equivalents with direct translation between languages, but also other cases where the collocations in the two languages are not literal translations of each other. Several experiments -evaluating collocations with three syntactic patterns-in English, Spanish, and Portuguese show that our approach can effectively extract large pairs of bilingual equivalents with an average precision of about 90%. Moreover, preliminary results on comparable corpora suggest that the distributional models can be applied for identifying new bilingual collocations in different domains.

ResumenEste trabajo se propone examinar la validez de la frecuencia como criterio para ordenar las colocaciones que se deben tratar en los sucesivos niveles de aprendizaje del español. Para ello se han estudiado los siguientes aspectos: (i) la opinión de profesionales de la enseñanza de español como lengua extranjera/segunda con respecto a los criterios que ellos emplearían para nivelar vocabulario; (ii) las propuestas de dichos profesionales al respecto; (iii) su intuición sobre frecuencia colocacional; y (iv) el distinto grado de dificultad que presentan a los aprendices colocaciones clasificadas en distintos niveles según su frecuencia. Los datos para valorar estas cuatro dimensiones se han obtenido mediante cuestionarios presentados a profesores y aprendices de español. Los resultados sugieren que los profesionales de la enseñanza consideran la frecuencia un criterio importante para secuenciar el vocabulario y sus propuestas coinciden de forma notable con una nivelación basada en la frecuencia. Los resultados con respecto a la intuición de los profesores sobre frecuencia colocacional y a la correlación entre el nivel asignado a las colocaciones y la dificultad que presentan a los aprendices son menos concluyentes. Palabras clavecolocaciones; enseñanza de español como lengua segunda/extranjera; nivelación; frecuencia AbstractThis article aims at examining the validity of using frequency as a criterion for assigning Spanish collocations to successive levels of proficiency. To that end, the following aspects have been studied: (i) the opinion of teachers of Spanish as a foreign/second language as to the criteria that should be used to grade vocabulary; (ii) the proposals of such professionals in that regard; (iii) their intuition on collocational frequency; and (iv) the degree of difficulty that collocations graded at different levels pose to learners. The data needed in order to explore these four dimensions have been collected by means of questionnaires administered both to teachers and learners of Spanish. The results suggest that teaching professionals regard frequency as an important criterion for grading vocabulary and their proposals coincide to a considerable extent with frequency-based grading. The findings regarding teachers' intuition on frequency as well as the correlation between frequency-based grading of collocations and collocation difficulty are less conclusive.

No abstract