Particle placement alternations in EFL learner speech: core probabilistic grammar and/or EFL-specific preferences?

Paquot, Magali [UCL]

(eng) Szmrecsanyi et al. (to appear) explored three syntactic alternations (the particle placement, genitive and dative alternations) in four varieties of English (British, Canadian, Indian and Singapore English) as represented in the International Corpus of English and reported that the varieties studied share a core probabilistic grammar, i.e. the choice between syntactic alternations is motivated by probabilistic constraints rather than categorical rules (cf. Bresnan, 2007). However, they also showed that grammatical variation is subject to indigenization “at various degrees of subtlety, depending on the abstractness and the lexical embedding of the syntactic pattern involved” (p. 2), with particle placement alternation exhibiting the most robust variety effects. The main objective of the case study presented here is to shed some light on whether English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners share a core probabilistic grammar with users of first and second language varieties of English. The study focuses on particle placement (as this alternation is more likely to exhibit variety effects, cf. Szmrecsanyi et al., to appear) and is driven by the following research questions: (1) What factors influence EFL learners’ particle placement alternations? (2) How do EFL learners’ particle placement preferences compare with those of users of first and second language varieties of English as described in Szmrecsanyi et al. (to appear)? The study makes use of the French and German L1 components of the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) (Gilquin et al., 2010) and largely replicates the methods used in Szmrecsanyi et al. (to appear) to identify transitive phrasal verbs and code particle placement alternations in EFL learner speech. Unlike in Szmrecsanyi et al. (to appear), however, identification and annotation of particle placement alternations are done fully manually for two main reasons: (1) tagging learner speech as represented in the LINDSEI proves unreliable and (2) the LINDSEI components are much smaller (about 50,000 words each) than the sub-corpora of the International Corpus of English. References Bresnan, J. (2007). Is syntactic knowledge probabilistic ? Experiments with the English dative alternation. In S. Featherston and W. Sternefeld (eds). Roots: Linguistics in Search of its Evidential Base. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 75-96. Gilquin, G., De Cock, S. & Granger, S. (2010). Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (CD-Rom + handbook). Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain. Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Jason Grafmiller, Benedikt Heller and Melanie Röthlisberger (to appear). Around the world in three alternations: modeling syntactic variation in varieties of English. English World-Wide, 37(2).