[Corpora-List] My semantic prosody questionnaire

[Eric Atwell]

irena,

my off-the-cuff explanation (no more than that, don't take this as expert
advice!) is that most English native speakers in Britain have very
little experience of thinking about and analysing language examples,
far less experience than English language learners; so they find it
strange and very difficult to judge "correctness" of English sentences
presented to them.  A language learner will be used to being presented
with "correct" examples, and will have seen examples marked "incorrect"
(in their own work!), whereas most Britons do not learn languages and
are not consciously aware of "incorrectness" in sentences unless it is
glaringly obvious, eg a repeated word.
So, it is not surprising to me that native speakers have a hard time
deciding whether your examples (presumably out of context?) are
acceptable, native speakers havent been "trained" to be used to doing
this, whereas learners are used to this sort of exercise.

I'm not sure if this helps your research though... good luck!

regards

eric

Eric Atwell, lecturer in COMPUTING (not English) Leeds University


On Sat, 22 Jan 2005, Irena Shuke wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I just received a questionnaire I had sent to England to be filled out by
> native speakers to see their awareness of semantic prosody. I knew (AND had
> been told) that it was best to just observe it in a corpus, but my aim was to
> see (compare) the difference between native and non-native speakers with
> respect to this. To test the intuitions of the both sides, so to say. (Well,
> I guess I did always want to see with my own eyes how native speakers would
> circle the "correct" sentence, such as 'She caused me a lot of trouble', and
> leave one like 'She caused me a lot of joy' alone.) Anyway, I thought a
> questionnaire given to both native and non-native speakers would show clearly
> the difference. First, I got them filled out by some of my fellow MA students
> (Linguistics, English Literature & ELT Methodology) who were all non-native
> speakers of English. Only one person scored enough for me to see she was
> showing consistent awareness of this phenomenon, but then, she and I had been
> discussing this, so I guess that doesn't count, although she had only been
> given one particular example ("cause") earlier in our discussions. (By
> "scored enough" I do not mean any particular percentage since I still have to
> decide how to best display my clever "findings".) A LOT of other respondents
> ticked off "Engineering of these goods will favourably affect the market" and
> "She caused me a lot of joy" as correct (acceptable, not "correct", but for
> some reason I tend to use the words "right/correct" and "wrong" when I think
> of it), or both the sentence that contained "caused me joy" and the one with
> "caused me trouble" in the same set, or ticked off "positively affect" and
> "favourably affect" but left out "seriously affect" and "badly affect" as
> unlikely. I decided to wait for the same questionnaire to come back from
> England where it would be administered to native speakers. I have to say that
> most of the sentences were either taken from a corpus AND modified or plain
> invented by me (esp. the provocative ones with the "unacceptable"
> collocations), because I didn't really want to underline the collocations
> that were to be thought about - so I decided to try to make all the sentences
> in one set look similar in form, so that only THE collocation would stand out
> in each of them by being the only different element. I did suspect that the
> respondents, esp. native speakers, might be put off by just any wrong
> collocation in a sentence before they even got to rejecting the sentence due
> to the clash of semantic prosodies. I also stated in the instructions that
> all of the sentences are correct grammatically. And before administering it
> to anyone at all, I had also shown the questionnaire to a tutor of mine just
> to make sure in general (she is a non-native speaker too).
> So I waited.
>
> Well, today I got 15 precious questionnaires from England. (Obviously it was
> not possible to get more in, but even these do illustrate something.)
>
> I looked at some of them and then double-checked the last "question" on each
> of them, i.e. 'Is English your mother tongue?' All said yes. Anyway, here are
> the results. 'She caused me a lot of trouble', 'She caused me a lot of
> misery', 'She caused me a lot of happiness', 'She caused me a lot of joy' are
> all ticked off as "likely to be used" in quite a few(!) people's responses.
> 'Engineering of these goods will favourably affect the market' - just fine in
> someone else's work. 'Caused me a lot of joy' - OK, but 'caused me a lot of
> happiness' - left out as "unlikely". I really don't know what to think. In
> some cases it might have been even ambiguity that I myself hadn't noticed, as
> in "Engineering of these goods will positively affect the market', which
> possibly might have been interpreted as "definitely". Yet, that is still not
> the only case. I myself really liked "cause" because it just seems very
> diagnostic to me, so I was hoping to see some consistency there. Alas.
>
> I am thinking now that perhaps it would make sense to put together a corpus
> of non-native students' works (for example) and see how they do or do not
> distinguish any semantic prosody patterns there, and of course there are a
> lot of corpora for researching native speakers' language.
>
> I really apologize if this seems outrageous, I do not mean to upset or
> disgust anyone. I guess I just had slightly different expectations (or hopes)
> of this experiment.
> I would be thankful for any opinions and input.
>
> Irena
> (MA Student of Linguistics, University of Latvia)
>
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--
Eric Atwell, Senior Lecturer, Computer Vision and Language research group,
School of Computing, University of Leeds, LEEDS LS2 9JT, England
TEL: +44-113-2335430  FAX: +44-113-2335468  http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/eric