Periphrastic causative constructions in EFL and ESL: The role of acquisition context

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle [UCL]

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) differ in their context of acquisition – mainly instructional in the case of EFL (classroom setting) and mainly naturalistic in the case of ESL (everyday interactions). Given a usage-based perspective on language acquisition, which views linguistic competence as the result of one’s “accumulated experience with language across the totality of usage events in [one’s] life” (Tomasello 2001: 62), we may expect this difference to have an effect on learners’ knowledge of English. In particular, it can be hypothesized that the higher degree of exposure to (authentic) language in the ESL context will lead to a better and more idiomatic knowledge of the language than is the case in the EFL context. This hypothesis was tested by means of a corpus-based analysis of periphrastic causative constructions, which have been studied in EFL (e.g. Gilquin 2012) and ESL (e.g. Ziegeler & Lee 2009) but whose behaviour in the two contexts has never been compared. Using data from the International Corpus of Learner English for EFL and from the International Corpus of English for ESL, as well as a corpus of native English as a reference, I examined the frequency and well-formedness of periphrastic causative constructions in EFL and ESL, but also their idiomaticity through a collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003) of the lexemes occurring in the non-finite verb slot. The results show that, from a formal point of view, ESL students do not necessarily use periphrastic causative constructions more accurately than the EFL students, but the non-standard constructions they use tend to follow some general tendencies of the English language. Thus, the construction [X MAKE Y Vto-inf], which is frequently found in ESL, corresponds to the general pattern of non-finite complementation, in which to-infinitive clauses are more common than bare infinitive clauses (see Biber et al. 1999: 699). By contrast, the EFL data display more varied, and apparently random, non-standard constructions, which often go against the general preferences of the English language, e.g. the use of an ing-form rather than a to-infinitive with the verb cause, while ing-clauses are generally less common than to-infinitive clauses in English (see Biber et al. 1999: 754). Although they do not exactly confirm the initial hypothesis, these results still support a usage-based view of language acquisition, in which ESL students, thanks to the larger (and richer) amount of input they receive, can better approximate construction schemas found in the English language. From a phraseological point of view, preliminary results suggest that periphrastic causative constructions are more idiomatic in ESL than in EFL, which might indicate that phraseology benefits more from exposure to authentic language than formal aspects. Finally, it appears that EFL and ESL also share some features, such as the use of a redundant be verb with make (e.g. Our illusions and creative imagination make us be different). These similarities underline that both EFL and ESL are non-native varieties, which are likely to involve common cognitive principles of language acquisition like redundancy or explicitation.