Learner corpora and contrastive interlanguage analysis

Conditional clauses in novice academic English: A comparison of Norwegian learners and native speakers

“…In the spirit of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger 1996, Hasselgård & Johansson 2011 this study involves comparison between first-and second-language use. The native speaker corpus (BAWE) is not seen as a target norm-the BAWE writers too are novice academic writers-but as a background against which it is instructive to view the writing of the advanced learners of English represented in VESPA.…”

The genitive alternation in Chinese and German ESL learners

“…For example, one case study of Hasselgård & Johansson (2011) compares relative frequencies of quite in the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) and four components of the ICLE and comments, among other things, that the learners overuse quite. However, the first part of this case study fails to take context into consideration in two ways: first, since the first part of Hasselgård & Johansson's (2011) case study does not consider the contexts of the uses of quite, they in effect consider every word a slot in which quite could have been used. This is an unrealistic assumption which, methodologically speaking, entails computing the relative frequencies with the frequency of quite in the numerator and the corpus size in words in the denominator.…”

“…The notion of multifactoriality entails questions of (i) the number of factors that co-determine when a form x is used (or when x is used rather than a functional near-equivalent y); (ii) how many of these factors are in fact included in a study; and (iii) whether all these factors are included at the same time. One case combining all these aspects is the first part of Hasselgård & Johansson's (2011) first case study on quite, in which no factors are considered at all. In the second part of their case study, however, one linguistic contextual factor is examined, namely the pattern in which quite is used (with an adjective, with an adverb, with a predicate, etc.).…”

Some Current Quantitative Problems in Corpus Linguistics and a Sketch of Some Solutions

“…- Altenberg (2002), who discusses frequencies/percentages of uses of English make and Swedish göra in four different constructional patterns and an 'other' category. - Hasselgård & Johansson's (2011) case study of the use of quite in the LOCNESS corpus and four components of the ICLE Corpus (Norway, Germany, France, and Spain) involving chi-squared tests comparing quite's frequency (both on its own and with a colligation) from the ICLE components to its LOCNESS frequency.…”

“…This is because many studies reduce the notion of comparable situation to a single co-occurring factor/predictor, such as when Altenberg (2002) explores the use of make based on one predictor-patterns that make co-occurs with-or when Hasselgård & Johansson (2011) explore the use of quite based on one predictor-its colligation. Given the many factors that co-determine, say, which word of a set of near synonymous words is chosen, or which of two or more grammatical constructions is chosen, such studies cannot be anything but severely impoverished.…”