A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
Learner language morphology as a window to crosslinguistic influences: A key structure analysis
Authors: Ivaska Ilmari, Siitonen Kirsti
Publisher: CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
Publishing place: Cambridge
Publication year: 2017
Journal: Nordic Journal of Linguistics
Journal name in source: NORDIC JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS
Journal acronym: NORD J LINGUIST
Volume: 40
Issue: 2
First page : 225
Last page: 253
Number of pages: 29
ISSN: 0332-5865
eISSN: 1502-4717
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0332586517000129(external)
Web address : https://doi.org/10.1017/S0332586517000129(external)
Abstract
The study of crosslinguistic influences (CLI) has proven that morphosyntactic features exhibit CLI. Technical development and novel resources have enabled detection-based approaches, where potential CLI are revealed based on their observed frequencies and on differences between learners with different language backgrounds. The two research questions are as follows: (i) How construction-specific typological (dis)similarities between L1 and L2 affect the frequencies of linguistic features? (ii) Can such (dis)similarities be detected by comparing feature frequency data of L2? The data come from the International Corpus of Learner Finnish, and the methodology applied is the key structure analysis. The results support the applicability of the method: they show that constructional similarities may trigger CLI construction by construction, irrespective of the general similarities or genealogical categorizations. The results further imply the importance of controlling the genre-related and topical variation to account for skewed nature of the data when dealing with naturally occurring learner language data.
The study of crosslinguistic influences (CLI) has proven that morphosyntactic features exhibit CLI. Technical development and novel resources have enabled detection-based approaches, where potential CLI are revealed based on their observed frequencies and on differences between learners with different language backgrounds. The two research questions are as follows: (i) How construction-specific typological (dis)similarities between L1 and L2 affect the frequencies of linguistic features? (ii) Can such (dis)similarities be detected by comparing feature frequency data of L2? The data come from the International Corpus of Learner Finnish, and the methodology applied is the key structure analysis. The results support the applicability of the method: they show that constructional similarities may trigger CLI construction by construction, irrespective of the general similarities or genealogical categorizations. The results further imply the importance of controlling the genre-related and topical variation to account for skewed nature of the data when dealing with naturally occurring learner language data.
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