Particle placement alternation in EFL learner speech vs. native and ESL spoken Englishes: core probabilistic grammar and/or L1-specific preferences?

Paquot, Magali [UCL] Grafmiller, Jason Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt

Szmrecsanyi et al. (2016) 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 variants 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., 2016) and is driven by the following research questions: (1) What factors influence EFL learners’ particle placement alternation? (2) How do EFL learners’ particle placement preferences compare with those of users of first and second language varieties of English? The study makes use of the French, German, Swedish and Dutch 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. (2016) to identify interchangeable transitive phrasal verbs with around, away, back, down, in, off, out, over, on, and up, and code particle placement variants in EFL learner speech. Unlike in Szmrecsanyi et al. (2016), however, identification and annotation of particle placement variants 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 (50 interviews each, between 75,000 and 95,000 words) than the corpora used in Szmrecsanyi et al. (2016). Results are compared with corpus data from the « Exploring probabilistic grammar(s) in varieties of English around the world » research project which explored particle placement alternation in 9 varieties of English as represented in the International Corpus of English (ICE): British, Canadian, Hong-Kong, Indian, Irish, Jamaican, New Zealand, Philippine and Singapore English. For comparability purposes, results are also compared with data from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation, i.e. a corpus of interviews with native speakers of English (LOCNEC; De Cock 2004). Predictors included in the analysis are variety, nativeness, type of the direct object, length of the direct object in number of words and letters, animacy, definiteness, giveness and thematicity of the direct object, frequency of the direct object, the presence of a directional PP following the target VP and the semantics of the verb. Like in Szmrecsanyi et al. (2016), the effect of the different variables is investigated with conditional inference trees (mostly for visualization of interactions among predictors) and conditional random forest (to measure the overall importance of each predictor). Preliminary results show that the type of the direct object (i.e. nominal head vs. pronominal head) and its length are the most important predictors of particle placement choice by EFL and L1 speakers (as represented in the LOCNEC corpus). EFL learners’ particle placement preferences, however, differ from L1 speakers of English in two main ways: (1) there is a bias towards V-Part-DO in learner speech and (2) unlike LOCNEC speakers, EFL learners do not seem to be sensitive to (in)definiteness. Findings thus suggest so far that EFL and L1 speakers share a core (albeit simplified) probabilistic grammar (i.e. the main effect of the type of the direct object and its length is found in the 5 varieties investigated so far; the direction of the effects is stable across all varieties) but there are also clear EFL-specific preferences (see Wulff et al, 2014 for similar findings about that-variation). However, no significant differences between learner groups were noted despite the fact that the first languages represented in the learner dataset differ by the presence or absence of linguistic structures similar to English phrasal verbs. We are now adding ICE data in our analyses so as to investigate how EFL learners’ particle placement preferences compare with those of users of second language varieties of English. Based on results reported in Szmrecsanyi et al. (2016), we hypothesize that EFL learners’ probabilistic grammar will resemble that of ESL speakers more than that of speakers of first language varieties. 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. De Cock, S. (2004). Preferred sequences of words in NS and NNS speech. BELL : Belgian journal of English language and literatures, 225-246. 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 (2016). Around the world in three alternations: modeling syntactic variation in varieties of English. English World-Wide, 37(2) : 109-137. Wulff, S., Lester, N. & Martinez-Garcia, M. (2014). That-variation in German and Spanish L2 English. Language and Cognition 6(2). 271–299.