Gaëtanelle Gilquin

Université Catholique de Louvain - UCLouvain | UCLouvain · Centre for English Corpus Linguistics

This article is a response to the commentaries written in reaction to my target article “Cognitive corpus linguistics and pedagogy: From rationale to applications”. It focuses on some issues raised by several commentators: the complexity of applying cognitive corpus linguistics in the language classroom; the question of authenticity in pedagogy; th...

This article deals with applied cognitive corpus linguistics, that is, the combined use of cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics for pedagogical purposes. It describes the main features of each framework in terms of teaching applications and underlines their complementarity. Through several illustrations, it shows how applied cognitive corpu...

This paper considers the issue of the norm in the context of learner corpus research and its implications for foreign language teaching. It seeks to answer three main questions: Does learner corpus research require a native norm? What corpus-derived norms are available and how do we choose? What do we do with these norms in the classroom? The first...

This chapter considers the use of data-driven learning (DDL) in the language classroom. It highlights its pedagogical functions and describes the main issues to bear in mind when choosing a corpus and a query tool to do DDL. It also provides an overview of the way DDL may be operationalised and shows how the DDL activities should be adapted to the...

This chapter argues that the passive should not be seen as a purely grammatical phenomenon, but as a phenomenon at the lexis-grammar interface, representing a continuum that ranges from the most central representatives to the most peripheral. It uses written corpus data to explore whether different populations of learners studying English as a fore...

This paper examines the use of online writing tools by French-speaking learners of English based on the analysis of screen recordings of a free composition task that come from the Process Corpus of English in Education, a process corpus of learner writing. The study charts learners’ use of online resources by investigating how often learners resort...

The Process Corpus of English in Education (PROCEED) is a learner corpus of English which, in addition to written texts, consists of data that make the writing process visible in the form of keystroke log files and screencast videos. It comes with rich metadata about each learner, among which indices of exposure to the target language and cognitive...

This chapter deals with the combined use of learner corpus data and experimental data to gain a better understanding of learner language and how it is acquired. It presents the advantages of such a combination and some of its challenges. It also describes the experimental methods that have most often been combined with learner corpus analyses. Exam...

While the field of learner corpus research has made a great deal of progress since its advent some thirty years ago, there are still areas that remain to be explored. In this chapter, two such areas, related to temporal evolution, are demarcated. The first one is diachronic learner corpus research, which considers the possible evolution of learner...

This article explores the possibility of identifying mentally stored constructions in writing process data, that is, data that reproduce the process through which a text is written. The unit that serves as a basis for the identification of constructions is the burst of writing, which corresponds to a chunk of text produced between two pauses. Burst...

One of the possible explanations for the decline in IQ test results over the last few decades is the effect computerised digitisation has on our communicative behaviour. In what I call the digital discourse mode the content of what is said is not interpreted but dealt with as data, which are processed mechanically, resulting in a Yes/No, Right/Wron...

en This paper adopts a construction grammar approach to test the efficiency of data‐driven learning (DDL) when applied to constructions. High‐intermediate learners of English as a foreign language took part in an experiment consisting, for each construction, in (i) a pre‐test, in which the learners had to produce as many sentences as possible illus...

This paper introduces an ongoing research project in Empirical Translation Studies which aims to investigate two key constructs in the field ‒ translation directionality (L1 vs L2 translation) and expertise (novice vs expert translation) ‒ through the prism of two purported translation properties: explicitation/explicitness and simplification/simpl...

This paper adopts a Construction Grammar approach to test the efficiency of data-driven learning (DDL) when applied to constructions. High-intermediate learners of English as a foreign language took part in an experiment consisting, for each construction, in (i) a pre-test, in which the learners had to produce as many sentences as possible illustra...

This chapter deals with learner corpora, that is, collections of (spoken and/or written) texts produced by learners of a language. It describes their main characteristics, with particular emphasis on those that are distinctive of learner corpora. Special types of corpora are introduced, such as longitudinal learner corpora or local learner corpora....

This chapter deals with learner corpora, that is, collections of (spoken and/or written) texts produced by learners of a language. It describes their main characteristics, with particular emphasis on those that are distinctive of learner corpora. Special types of corpora are introduced, such as longitudinal learner corpora or local learner corpora....

In this digital age, characterized by an extensive use of information technology, information literacy has taken on great importance as a translation skill. It is part and parcel of various models of translation competence (see, e.g., PACTE’s 2003 and Alves & Gonçalves’s 2007 instrumental subcompetence and Göpferich’s 2009 tools and research compet...

While the field of learner corpus research has made a great deal of progress since its advent some thirty years ago, there are still areas that remain to be explored. In this chapter, two such areas, related to temporal evolution, are demarcated. The first one is diachronic learner corpus research, which considers the possible evolution of learner...

Light verb constructions (LVCs), that is, combinations like take a walk or make a choice , are often claimed to be problematic for non-native speakers of English. In this paper, spoken data from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus are used to explore the use of these constructions across different sections of the corpus, representing different proficiency...

This chapter deals with the combined use of learner corpus data and experimental data to gain a better understanding of learner language and how it is acquired. It presents the advantages of such a combination and some of its challenges. It also describes the experimental methods that have most often been combined with learner corpus analyses. Exam...

Construction Grammar, like many other theoretical frameworks in linguistics, tends to be characterized by a bias toward the study of written, rather than spoken, language. This bias is also visible in the young field of Applied Construction Grammar, which is the focus of this paper. Adopting a threefold perspective, the paper pleads for more resear...

Elisabeth Bruckmaier, Getting at get in World Englishes: A corpus-based semasiological-syntactic analysis (Topics in English Linguistics 95). Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017. Pp. xvi + 328. ISBN 9783110495997. - Gaëtanelle Gilquin

This paper empirically tests a number of criteria proposed in the literature to identify the prototype of a linguistic category in order to see how they compare with each other - and what this can tell us about the concept of prototypicality. The item under investigation is through, and the starting point is an intuition-based definition of prototy...

Taking Mair's (2013) World System of Englishes as a starting point, this chapter seeks to investigate whether American English is a more important source of influence than British English for the other varieties of English, including English as an institutionalised second language and English as a foreign language. The study is based on twenty pair...

This chapter seeks to bring together all the contributions in the volume. We identify converging lines of argumentation and findings across the studies featured in the book and we show how the approaches they adopt and the linguistic patterns they uncover shed new light on globalized Englishes, the diversity of their uses and their emerging functio...

In research on L2 English, recent corpus-based studies indicate that some non- standard forms are shared by indigenized (ESL) and foreign (EFL) varieties of English, which challenges the idea of a clear dichotomy between innovation and error. We present a data-driven large-scale method to detect innovations, test it on verb + preposition structures...

This article presents a corpus-based contrastive study of (dis)fluency in French and English, focusing on the clustering of discourse markers (DMs) and filled pauses (FPs) across various spoken registers. Starting from the hypothesis that markers of (dis)fluency, or ‘fluencemes’, occur more frequently in sequences than in isolation, and that their...

This chapter investigates how the context of acquisition, and more precisely the amount of naturalistic input received, may influence non-native speakers’ knowledge of English discourse markers. It considers three levels of analysis, from the more individual (foreign language learners having spent different periods of time in a target language coun...

In research on L2 English, recent corpus-based studies indicate that some non-standard forms are shared by indigenized (ESL) and foreign (EFL) varieties of English, which challenges the idea of a clear dichotomy between innovation and error. We present a data-driven large-scale method to detect innovations, test it on verb + preposition structures...

Written and spoken data produced by learners has always been a key resource for the study of second language acquisition (SLA). However, for a long time the data used was rather artificial, i.e. resulting from highly controlled language tasks, and therefore not necessarily a reflection of what learners do in more natural communication contexts. In...

The origins of learner corpus research go back to the late 1980s, when large electronic collections of written or spoken data started to be collected from foreign/second language learners, with a view to advancing our understanding of the mechanisms of second language acquisition and developing tailor-made pedagogical tools. Engaging with the inter...

This paper offers a contrastive collostructional analysis of English and French periphrastic causative constructions with make/faire in academic writing. Using data from the British National Corpus (for English) and from Scientext (for French), it investigates the interaction between the constructions and their nonfinite verb slot. The (simple and...

This paper examines the possible interface between contact linguistics and second language acquisition research by comparing the institutionalized second-language varieties of English known as “New Englishes” and the foreign varieties of English called “Learner Englishes”. On the basis of corpus data representing several populations of various orig...

Since the development of the field of second language acquisition (SLA), which Gass et al. (1998: 409) situate in the 1960s or 1970s, use has been made of authentic data representing learners’ interlanguage. However, what has characterised many of these SLA studies is the small number of subjects investigated and the limited size of the data collec...

While a large range of language varieties had been explored by corpus linguists from the emergence of the field, it was only in the late 1980s that corpus linguists began to show an interest in learner language and started collecting learner corpora, i.e. electronic collections of writing or speech produced by foreign or second language learners. T...

This paper investigates the use of phrasal verbs by French-speaking foreign learners of English, using spoken and written learner corpus data and comparing them against similar data representing native English. It adopts a constructional approach, which distinguishes between three levels of analysis: the higher level of the phrasal verb `superconst...

This paper looks at the ways of refining the technique of collostructional analysis, and more precisely multiple distinctive collexeme analysis, by taking word senses into account. It presents the main results of a sense-based multiple distinctive collexeme analysis of the non-finite verb slot of English periphrastic causative constructions and sho...

This paper seeks to describe foreign learners' use of English periphrastic causative constructions, by comparing data from the International Corpus of Learner English with similar data from the British National Corpus. While the frequency of the constructions and the syntactic errors found in the learner corpus are briefly discussed, the focus of t...

In this introduction, we wish to provide a broad overview of errors and disfluencies, showing how they are defined – and distinguished from each other – in the literature, and what impact the corpus revolution has had on the study of these phenomena. We will also demonstrate the usefulness of investigating such items by examining some of the possib...

This chapter revisits the dichotomy that is traditionally made in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research between English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) and argues, on the basis of data from the International Corpus of Learner English, that it should be viewed as a continuum instead, with many in-between categ...

The eleven contributions to this volume, written by expert corpus linguists, tackle corpora from a wide range of perspectives and aim to shed light on the numerous linguistic and pedagogical uses to which corpora can be put. They present cutting-edge research in the authors’ respective domain of expertise and suggest directions for future research....

Within cognitive linguistics, there is an increasing awareness that the study of linguistic phenomena needs to be grounded in usage. Ideally, research in cognitive linguistics should be based on authentic language use, its results should be replicable, and its claims falsifiable. Consequently, more and more studies now turn to corpora as a source o...

Data-Driven Learning (DDL) consists in using the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics for pedagogical purposes. This type of approach presents several advantages. The first obvious one is that it brings authenticity into the classroom. Not only do corpora make it possible to expose learners to authentic language, but they can actually present...

This paper compares DO/MAKE in several related European languages, some having two different verbs at their disposal (e.g. do and make in English) and others having to make do with just one verb (e.g. French faire). Using translation corpus data, we demonstrate that, while there are similarities between some of these verbs (especially when the lang...

Abstract This paper offers a state-of-the-art review of the combination,of corpora and experimental methods. Using a sample of recent studies, it shows (i) that psycholinguists regularly exploit the benefits of combining,corpus and experimental data, whereas corpus linguists do so much more rarely, and (ii) that psycholinguists and corpus linguists...

This paper shows how contrastive analysis and interlanguage analysis can be combined into a model which aims to detect phenomena of transfer, explain them and evaluate them in terms of pedagogical relevance. The model, referred to as the Detection-Explanation-Evaluation (DEE) transfer model, relies on Granger's (1996) Integrated Contrastive Model a...

This article aims to investigate the empirical validity of the types of lexical networks found in the cognitive literature which account for the various senses of a polysemous word by showing how each sense is an extension of another. It starts from an existing network analysis, namely Norvig & Lakoff’s [1987] analysis of the verb take, and compare...

The study reported on in this paper uses corpus data in order to examine how upper-intermediate to advanced EFL learners from a wide range of mother tongue backgrounds perform a number of rhetorical functions particularly prominent in academic discourse, and how this compares with native academic writing. In particular, it is shown that one of the...

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I don't think you can measure life in terms of years. I think longevity doesn't necessarily have anything to do with happiness. I mean, happiness comes from facing challenges and going out on a limb and taking risks. If you're not willing to take a risk for something you really care about, you might as well be dea...

The starting point of this chapter is the observation that the French preposition avec, which is generally considered as the translational equivalent of with, is rarely used as a translation of with in parallel corpus data. A more detailed analysis of the corpus data reveals that polysemy partly explains this situation (with is more polysemous than...

This article deals with the place of learner corpora, i.e. corpora containing authentic language data produced by learners of a foreign/second language, in English for academic purposes (EAP) pedagogy and sets out to demonstrate that they have a valuable contribution to make to the field. Following an initial brief introduction to corpus-based anal...

This article studies advanced French-speaking learners' knowledge of make-collocations. It suggests that, while an investigation of the errors found in a learner corpus may be enlightening, it should ideally be complemented by two other types of analyses, namely a comparison of the learner corpus data with native data, which highlights phenomena of...

The study presented here centers on the causative verbs get and have. Within the framework of frame semantics and on the basis of corpus data, it is shown that the two verbs have a number of features in common but also present important differences. In addition, this study is an illustration of how the cognitive theory of frame semantics can be com...

The study of complex grammatical patterns tends to be neglected by corpus linguists, the main reason being that such phenomena are much more difficult to extract from a corpus than simple words or tags. I demonstrate in this article that, although the desirable parsed corpora and appropriate software are not always available, the retrieval of synta...

This article shows how the approach of Contrastive Analysis can be combined with that of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis in what has been called the Integrated Contrastive Model (Granger 1996a). Through the illustration of English and French causative constructions, it is demonstrated that corpus contrastive data can help explain some of the cha...

This paper shows, on the basis of a comparison of learner corpus data with written and spoken native corpus data, that learners tend to use spoken features when organising their academic writing. Possible explanations are offered to account for this problem of register confusion, including L1 transfer, L2 instruction and developmental factors. Sugg...

While the usefulness of corpora for the description of language cannot be denied, it must also be recognised that they are not the only sources for language data. Corpora show how people use language in authentic environments, or what is likely to occur in language, but they do not make it possible to answer questions having to do with, say, gramma...

This paper deals with one particular type of causative construction, namely the periphrastic causative construction where the CAUSER is coreferential with the CAUSEE. This phenomenon is discussed within Talmy's (1986, 2000) theory of force dynamics, and more precisely his concept of psychodynamics, according to which the human psyche is made up of...

Mastering academic writing is not an easy task for learners, especially when the language they have to use is not their mother tongue. Not only do they have to acquire a specialised vocabulary, but they also have to find an appropriate voice, one that will be accepted by the academic community as a whole. It has been suggested in the literature tha...

Using the technique of multiple distinctive collexeme analysis, this paper seeks to determine the verbs that are distinctively associated with the non-finite verb slot of English periphrastic causative constructions. Not only does the analysis reveal that the various causative constructions are attracted to essentially different verbs, but by exami...