27.158, Calls: Lang Acq, Text/Corpus Ling/Germany

Fri Jan 8 17:21:26 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-158. Fri Jan 08 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.158, Calls: Lang Acq, Text/Corpus Ling/Germany

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Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2016 12:21:06
From: Robert Fuchs [robert.fuchs at uni-muenster.de]
Subject: Workshop on Tense and Aspect in Learner Language: Issues and Advances in Corpora

Full Title: Workshop on Tense and Aspect in Learner Language: Issues and Advances in Corpora 

Date: 20-Jul-2016 - 20-Jul-2016
Location: Giessen, Germany 
Contact Person: Robert Fuchs
Meeting Email: robert.fuchs at uni-muenster.de
Web Site: https://www.uni-giessen.de/faculties/f05/engl/ling/talc 

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 31-Mar-2016 

Meeting Description:

Pre-conference workshop at TaLC 12, 20-23 July 2016

Conveners: Valentin Werner (University of Bamberg) and Robert Fuchs
(University of Münster)

Traditional approaches to the study of the morphosyntax of learner language
were often based on experimental or elicited data (e.g., acceptability
judgements, cloze tests, etc.), where evidence is collected in restricted
contexts in order to answer a specific research question. With more and more
learner corpora for various target languages becoming available to the
research community (see, e.g., the extensive list on
www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-lcworld.html), the field of learner corpus research
offers new perspectives on learner language, and also presents new challenges.

Learner corpora present many advantages to both individual researchers and the
community: (i) they are usually large (typically, hundreds of thousands or
millions of words), making it easier to achieve empirical validity; (ii) they
are often publicly available, making it easier to check whether previous
results can be reproduced and substantiated; and (iii) annotations of
linguistic features can be produced collaboratively and shared along with the
original data. All these advantages contribute to making the research efforts
of the community more data-driven, and thus more reliable and representative
of authentic learner language.

More specifically, the expression of temporal relations (in terms of tense and
aspect) is central in all processes of communication (Housen 2002), but
commonly perceived and described as a hurdle for non-native speakers (see,
e.g., van der Wurff 1999; Davydova 2011). Therefore, the topic of tense and
aspect has already received considerable attention in the literature (see,
e.g., contributions in Dietrich, Klein & Noyau and Salaberry & Shirai 2002),
but features less prominently in recent corpus-based studies of learner
language (but see, e.g., Römer 2005 or Rogatcheva 2014 for exceptions).

With this workshop, we intend to close this gap und to show which additional
insights into the area of tense and aspect in learner language can be gained
using corpus data, addressing the following aspects, amongst others:

- In which ways do corpus-based studies complement work based on other (e.g.,
experimental) methods?
- How can a corpus-based approach inform theories of the acquisition of tense
and aspect (such as the ''aspect hypothesis'' or the ''past tense
hypothesis''; see Fuchs, Götz & Werner forthcoming) specifically, and of
language acquisition in general?
- How pervasive are effects of mode/register within learner corpus data?
- Which methodological challenges (e.g. as to the categorization of variants)
come to the fore when using corpus data instead of elicited data?
- How can the often-debated notion of ''target(-like)'' be operationalized for
corpus material, where a certain amount of variation may be inherent in both
the learner and target language data?
- Which implications do the findings from the learner corpora have for the
teaching and learning of the target language?

Dr. Robert Fuchs
English Linguistics
University of Münster
Johannisstr. 12 - 20  
D-48143 Münster
Germany

Website: https://uni-muenster.academia.edu/RobertFuchs

Call for abstracts:

We invite contributions for oral presentations of 20 minutes plus 10 minutes
discussion that address these issues and use material from language corpora
(potentially in combination or contrast with other types of data) to shed
light on the acquisition of tense and aspect in learner language. Please send
abstracts of 300-500 words (exclusive of references) to
valentin.werner at uni-bamberg.de and robert.fuchs at uni-muenster.de until 31 March
2016. Notification of acceptance will be sent out by the end of April 2016.

References:

Davydova, Julia. 2011. The present perfect in non-native Englishes: A
corpus-based study of variation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Dietrich, Rainer, Wolfgang Klein & Colette Noyau (eds.). 1995. The acquisition
of temporality in a second language. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Fuchs, Robert, Sandra Götz & Valentin Werner. Forthcoming. The present perfect
in learner Englishes: A corpus-based case study on L1 German intermediate and
advanced speech and writing. In Valentin Werner, Elena Seoane & Cristina
Suárez-Gómez (eds.), Re-assessing the present perfect. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.

Housen, Alex. 2002. A corpus-based study of the L2-acquisiton of the English
verb system. In Sylviane Granger, Joseph Hung & Stephanie Petch-Tyson (eds.),
Computer learner corpora, second language acquisition, and foreign language
teaching, 77-116. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Rogatcheva, Svetlomira. 2014. Aspect in learner writing: A corpus-based
comparison of advanced Bulgarian and German learners' written English.
Giessen: University of Giessen dissertation.

Römer, Ute. 2005. Progressives, patterns, pedagogy: A corpus-driven approach
to English progressive forms, functions, contexts and didactics. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.

Salaberry, Rafael & Yasuhiro Shirai (eds.). 2002 The L2 acquisition of
tense-aspect morphology. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

van der Wurff, Wim. 1999. Some observations on the present perfect puzzle in
pedagogical grammars of English. In Guy A. J. Tops, Betty Devriendt & Steven
Geukens (eds.), Thinking English grammar, 471-484. Leuven: Peeters.

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