Alternation phenomena and language proficiency: the genitive alternation in the spoken language of EFL learners

Abstract

This study investigates how foreign language proficiency, which previous corpus-based research on alternation phenomena has largely ignored, influences the choice of genitive variant (the tail of the dog/the dog’s tail) in learners of English as a Foreign Language. The data stems from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus, a three-million-word corpus featuring spoken language from low-intermediate to advanced learners of English from several L1 backgrounds. The collected genitive observations were annotated for various constraints such as the length, animacy, definiteness and discourse status of the constituents and then analyzed via mixed-effects logistic regression. The results show that although native speakers and learners are remarkably similar, low-proficiency learners are less sensitive to possessor definiteness and possessor animacy, the latter of which is otherwise the strongest constraint of the genitive alternation.

Against level-3-only analyses in corpus linguistics

“…Second, this paper is also not denying that there is an increasing body of work that, as a reviewer put it, "gets it right" -that is indeed the case and that is a very welcome development; studies that succeed in discussing level-3 variables but correctly include lower-level variables in their quantitative design include, in learner corpus research, Lester (2019), Wulff and Gries (2021), or Dubois, Paquot and Szmrecsanyi (2022) and, in varieties research, Heller et al (2017), many studies from current or former members of a research group in Leuven (e.g. Grafmiller and Szmrecsanyi 2018), or , to name but a few.…”

Animacy effects in the English genitive alternation: comparing native speakers and EFL learner judgments with corpus data

“…This raises the question of how the probabilistic grammar of EFL learners develops as they become more proficient. With this question in mind, Dubois et al (2023) investigated how low-intermediate to advanced EFL learners from various L1 backgrounds (e.g. Spanish, Italian, Hindi, Chinese, and Russian) choose between the s-genitive (1) and the of-genitive (2).…”

“…Animate referents, which are easy to retrieve from memory (Branigan et al, 2008), would therefore be produced early, which means that an animate possessor favours the s-genitive where the possessor comes first. While animacy is normally the strongest constraint of the genitive alternation (Rosenbach, 2014), Dubois et al (2023) found that B1 speakers are more likely than native speakers to use the s-genitive when the possessor is inanimate, whereas B2 speakers are more likely than native speakers to use the of-genitive when the possessor is animate (Dubois et al, 2023). This finding is reminiscent of other studies on the genitive in World Englishes and the development of the English genitive over time where the strength of the animacy constraint was found to fluctuate (Heller et al, 2017;Wolk et al, 2013).…”

“…Although Dubois et al (2023) and similar studies aim to shed light on the implicit grammatical knowledge of learners regarding constraints, there are fundamental differences between how statistical models and humans gather knowledge about distributional patterns. For example, regression models like the one used by Dubois et al (2023) have difficulty dealing with multicollinearity, yet collinearity and redundancy are an integral part of language (Milin et al, 2016, p. 508). In general, corpus-based models are able to "reflect the characteristics of mental processes and structures yielding usage, even though we do not know the exact form of these mental representations" (Divjak & Arppe, 2013, p. 230).…”

“…Applied to the genitive alternation, this means that it is unclear whether the probabilistic constraints that affect language use according to the corpus-based regression model actually derive from the implicit grammatical knowledge of speakers (Klavan & Divjak, 2016) or whether they are simply frequent patterns of language use. Therefore, we compare the development of EFL learners' patterns of language use according to the regression model of Dubois et al (2023) against the acceptability judgments of learners at different proficiency levels in a rating task experiment. Whereas experimental data are typically less valid ecologically than corpus data, rating task experiments do not primarily concern language production and instead tap into the intuitions of speakers regarding the acceptability of the variants (Arppe & Järvikivi, 2007, p. 132;Gilquin & Gries, 2009;Klavan & Divjak, 2016, p. 361), which offers a different perspective on the development of probabilistic grammars for EFL learners across proficiency levels.…”