Underuse of syntactic categories in Falkoa case study on modification
- Hirschmann, Hagen
- Lüdeling, Anke
- Rehbein, Ines
- Reznicek, Marc
- Zeldes, Amir
- Granger, Sylviane (ed. lit.)
- Gilquin, Gaëtanelle (ed. lit.)
- Meunier, Fanny (ed. lit.)
Argitaletxea: Presses Universitaires de Louvain ; Université Catholique de Louvain
ISBN: 978-2-87558-199-0
Argitalpen urtea: 2013
Orrialdeak: 223-234
Biltzarra: Learner Corpus Research Conference (1. 2011. Louvain)
Mota: Biltzar ekarpena
Laburpena
This paper shows how the automatic syntactic analysis of a corpus of advanced learners of German as a foreign language helps in understanding the acquisition of modification. In former corpus research modification has been studied only by comparing the distributions of single words (or groups of words) in learner and native speaker data. We argue that in order to study modification as a syntactic category it is necessary to work with syntactically analyzed corpora. In this vein, we sketch out our approach to parsing learner language and conduct two contrastive interlanguage studies on modification in the syntactically annotated corpus, showing that not only lexical modifiers can be underused (as shown in many other studies), but that modification as a whole category (including multi-word modifiers such as prepositional phrases, and clausal modifiers such as relative clauses) is underused in our learner corpus data.