Linguistic Models, Acquisition Theories, and Learner Corpora: Morphological Productivity in SLA Research Exemplified by Complex Verbs in German

Abstract

The present study analyzes morphological productivity for complex verbs in second language acquisition by analyzing a corpus of German as a Foreign Language (GFL). It shows that advanced learners of GFL use prefix and particle verbs relatively frequently and productively but less so than native speakers do and discusses these findings in the light of different linguistic models and acquisition theories. It argues that corpus data must be evaluated against good models and that it is necessary to make the categorization decisions available as annotations.

A Challenge for Contrastive L1/L2 Corpus Studies: Large Inter- and Intra-Individual Variation Across Morphological, but Not Global Syntactic Categories in Task-Based Corpus Data of a Homogeneous L1 German Group

“…We are forced to accept this limitation since not all L1 texts in Falko are available with corrected dependency tags yet. Neither of the corpora was compiled for the purpose of this study, both are publicly available (see data availability statement at the end of this paper) and have been previously used in a number of other studies (Hirschmann et al, 2013;Zeldes, 2013;Hirschmann, 2015;Lüdeling et al, 2017Lüdeling et al, , 2021Wan, 2021, among others).…”

“…Chapman (2016, p. 110) in a study of second language writing assessment shows that lexical sophistication, academic vocabulary use, syntactic complexity, cohesion, and fluency of a response can be strongly influenced by prompt characteristics. Even relatively abstract elements such as the morphological class of particle verbs in German can be prompt-primed in both L1 and L2 according to Lüdeling et al (2017). The way writers respond to a specific prompt is also expected to have more far-reaching consequences, namely on the selected register of the produced text 10 .…”

“…Rather than just using "more" or "fewer" complex forms, each individual participant in the native speaker group appears to follow their own distribution of classes-a type of information that is, to a degree, implicitly included in the boxplot in Figure 2, but becomes strikingly more obvious in the tiled pie charts. While some participants use prefix verbs more than any a comparative study of complex verb productivity in German L1 vs. L2 in Lüdeling et al (2017). 16 This would matter in an actual contrastive scenario, because it can provide insights into the structure of the morphological system, for example whether morphologically complex verbs take an equally central position among the other subclasses in L2 and L1, and answer questions concerning productivity and lexicalization, complexity, or the development of aspect and perspectivation through verb modification.…”

¿Solamente o solamento?: desafíos en el aprendizaje de forma y significado de -mente y -miento/-mento por hablantes de ele

“…Debido a que los datos disponibles sobre conciencia morfológica en ELE provienen principalmente de pruebas muy controladas (Sánchez Gutiérrez y Hernández Muñoz, 2018), falta aún información sobre el uso real, en contexto de producción escrita u oral, de morfemas derivativos. En efecto, son muy pocos los trabajos que han analizado la utilización de afijos y errores de formación de palabras en aprendices de ELE (Fernández, 1996;Whitley, 2004;Zyzik y Azevedo, 2009) y ya hay autores, en inglés o en alemán, que han defendido la necesidad de utilizar datos de corpus para analizar el uso productivo de morfemas en aprendices de segundas lenguas (Callies, 2016;Lüdeling, Hirschmann y Shadrova, 2017).…”

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

“…The past three decades have seen an enormous increase in the number of annotated corpora and corpus-based research tools (Lüdeling & Kytö, 2009;Ide & Pustejovsky, 2017), many of which were made available for linguistic and psycholinguistic research on all aspects of language use and language processing (e.g., Arciuli, Monaghan, & Seva, 2010;Lüdeling, Hirschmann, & Shadrova, 2017). For instance, the resources hosted by CLARIN (https://www.clarin.eu), TalkBank (https://talkbank.org), and related repositories have enabled researchers to study human communication and language use in a variety of contexts.…”