[Corpora-List] Introspective help: summary of responses

[Costas Gabrielatos]

Dear All

I'd like to thank those of you who responded to my query - with extra thanks
to those who provided comments. I have attached a summary of the responses.

Costas Gabrielatos
Lancaster University,
http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/profiles/305/ 

-----------------------------------------

Background

A few days ago I sent out a query asking for introspective judgements on the
function of two sentences (no context or co-text was given). The query was
sent to a number of lists - respondents were predominantly professionals in
(applied) linguistics and language education.

The two sentences were:  

(1) If they want others to do it, I'll advise against their having children.
(2) If they want others to do it, I'd advise against their having children.

Respondents were asked to choose one of the following options: 

	A. Both sentences function as advice 
	B. Only sentence (1) functions as advice 
	C. Only sentence (2) functions as advice 
	D. Neither sentence functions as advice 
	E. I cannot tell out of context 

I also asked respondents whether they considered themselves to be native
speakers (NS) or non-native speakers (NNS) of English.

Reason for the query

I wanted to have 'second opinions' on the interpretation of these sentences
given in Athanasiadou & Dirven (1996: 641-642). Sentence (2) is an attested
example from the Bank of English corpus; sentence (1) is constructed by the
authors to be contrasted with (2). No co-text or contextual information is
provided in the paper. The authors argue that in (2) "the speaker pronounces
his or her conditional negative advice", whereas in (1) "no act of advising
is performed, but only a prediction that such an act will take place" (p.
642). As both authors are, strictly speaking, non-native speakers of
English, and as it not improbable that they would have consulted native
speakers, I decided to also check for any similarities/differences between
NS and NNS respondents. I need to clarify that my interest does not directly
lie in the function of the sentences; rather, I'm interested in the
implications of their perceived function for the typology presented by the
authors.

Breakdown of responses, and some observations

In total, I received 163 responses (115 NS and 48 NNS). Some respondents
thought that the sentences made no sense or were ill-formed. Although these
responses could be conflated with 'E', I decided to treat them separately
(for consistency, they're listed as response 'F'). As the NS-NNS distinction
is not universally accepted, the following table also presents the breakdown
in terms of all respondents. 

Response                        	All-%         NS-%            NNS-%
A  [both]                           15.9%         15.6%           16.7%
B  [only (1)]                        4.9%          2.6%           10.4%
C  [only (2)]                      	41.1%         40.9%           41.7%
D  [neither]                       	22.1%         21.7%           22.9%
E  [cannot tell]                  	12.9%         15.7%            6.3%
F  [do not make sense]      		 3.1%          3.5%            2.1%

Although option C (only sentence (2) functions as advice) was the top choice
(41.1% overall, 40.9% of NS, 41.7% of NNS), no clear consensus seems to
emerge from the responses. However, except for options E and B, NS and NNS
responses are very similar (although, for B, the number of responses is too
low for any comparisons to be made). 

It is also interesting to look at the perceived function of each sentence
individually, irrespective of the perceived function of the other sentence
(by collating responses 'A' with responses 'B' and 'C' respectively).
Overall, from those who chose option A-D, about one in five think (1)
functions as advice, slightly above half think (2) functions as advice, and
about one in five think neither does. Again, there is no clear consensus.

                           All-%         NS-%         NNS-%
(1) is advice [A+B]        20.9%         18.9%         25.0%
(2) is advice [A+C]        57.1%         58.6%         53.9%
None is advice [D]         22.1%         22.5%         21.1%

Finally, in addition to those who responded 'E', the majority of those who
chose A-D also commented on the difficulty of deciding on the function of
the sentences out of context.

Reference

Athanasiadou, A. & Dirven, R. (1996). Typology of if-clauses. In E.H. Casad
(ed.) Cognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods: The expansion of a new paradigm
in linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics Research 6 (pp. 609-654). Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.

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