A Recurrent Word Combination Approachto the Study of Formulae in the Speech of Native and Non-Native Speakers of English

Abstract

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.

Using Language Corpora in Initial Teacher Education: Pedagogic Issues and Practical Applications

“…, Tribble (1998), andMilton (1998), outline useful procedures for using corpora as a supplementary tool for non-native speakers, whereby native and non-native speaker data are compared and analysed by students for the purposes of language advancement. Trainees will be interested to find out more about a large-scale international corpus project focusing on the written English of learners from many different first language backgrounds which has been compiled in recent years to form the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) (see for example Granger, 1996Granger, , 1998Granger, , 1999Granger, Hung, & Petch-Tyson, 2002 Cock, 1998aCock, , 1998bCock, , 2000.…”

Functional Distribution of Lexical Bundle in Native and Non-Native Students’ Argumentative Writing

“…In fact, the actual frequency of lexical bundle cut-off arbitrarily ranges from 20 times per million words (Cortes, 2004;Hyland, 2008a;Reppen, 2009;Wei & Lei, 2011) to 25 times per million words (Chen & Baker, 2010) or even 40 times per million words (Biber & Barbieri, 2007). For smaller corpora, such as spoken corpora, a raw cut-off frequency can be used from two to 10 times (De Cock, 1998). Another criterion for the lexical bundle selection should be the number of occurring lexical bundles in texts in a corpus.…”

“…For example, cluster, a similar linguistic structure stemming from the concept of collocation, refers to a contiguous sequence of a certain number of words without considering its grammatical structure (Scott & Tribble, 2006). A number of studies have also focused on multi-word expressions labeled as lexicalized sentence stem (Pawley & Syder, 1983), lexical phrase (Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992), formulaic sequence (Wray, 2006), phraseology (Cowie, 1998), chunks (De Cock, 1998), or n-grams in computational linguistics and computer science (Manning & Schütze, 2001). Structurally, these terms ultimately refer to contiguous word sequences retrieved from corpora with specified frequency and distribution criteria.…”

A corpus-driven analysis of structural types of lexical bundles in court judgments in English and their translation into Lithuanian

“…Different genres of spoken and written academic discourse have been investigated by , Cortes (2004), Biber et al (2004), Simpson (2004), Biber (2006), Hyland (2008b), Simpson-Vlach and Ellis (2010), Salazar (2010), Jalali and Moini (2014), Pan et al (2016), andYang (2017). Besides different studies focusing on the use of lexical bundles across different disciplines, many of the previous works on lexical bundles in academic discourse have focused on differences and similarities of the use of lexical bundles between L1 and L2 writers (Salazar 1996;De Cock 1998;Schmitt 2005;Salazar 2011;Juknevičienė 2011;Ädel & Erman 2012;Amirian et al 2013;Purificación 2013;Pan et al 2016;Güngör & Uysal 2016;Güngör 2016) as well as between novice and expert writers (Cortes 2004;Chen & Baker 2010).…”