Ongoing Research of MCL Team Members

Exploring the variation and distribution of academic n-grams and phrase-frames in MICUSP (Ute Römer & Matthew Brook O’Donnell)

This project examines the forms, functions and textual distribution of repeated word combinations in advanced student academic writing on different proficiency levels and across academic disciplines. It makes use of the newly compiled Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP) to explore the distribution of phrases such as ‘the fact that’ and ‘it is clear’ across different academic disciplines and also the places within a text they tend to occur, e.g. beginning, middle or end of sentences and paragraphs.

Related publications:

• O’Donnell, M. B. & U. Römer (In preparation). Investigating the interaction between phraseological items and textual position.

Measuring formulaic language in corpora from the perspective of language as a Complex System (Matthew Brook O’Donnell & Nick C. Ellis)

Building on recent work that has applied the theory and methods of complex systems research to the study of language structure, acquisition and change (see LaCAS Conference page) we are investigating the distribution and behavior of formulaic language across a range of text-types. Scale-free or Zipfian distributions are one of the hallmarks of a complex system, found in some surprisingly different domains such as the number of in- and out-going links on web pages, the population size of major cities in the USA and protein interactions in yeast cells! Zipf’s original observation of the distribution was in the context of word frequency lists of texts and subsequent analysis shows how it holds for morphological, syntactic and semantic features of language. In this project we are are looking at recurrent sequences extracted from corpora (see Formulaic Language Project) to discover whether they follow a Zipfian distribution in terms of:

1. their frequency of occurrence according to different thresholds and association measures
2. their ‘degree’, that is, how they collocate with other formulaic sequences
3. their adoption and use by language users in text

Creating meaning in academic discourse: The development of a local lexical grammar of evaluation (Ute Römer)

This project focuses on the identification and examination of meaningful units in a corpus of academic book reviews. It devises a new analytical model that leads to a profile of the central phraseological items in the selected text type.

Related publications:

• Römer, U. (2008). Identification impossible? A corpus approach to realisations of evaluative meaning in academic writing. Functions of Language 15(1): 115-130.
• Römer, U. (2010). Establishing the phraseological profile of a text type: The construction of meaning in academic book reviews. English Text Construction 3(1): 95-119.
• Römer, U. (Forthcoming). Observations on the phraseology of academic writing: Local patterns – local meanings? In: Herbst, T, S Faulhaber & P. Uhrig (eds.). The Phraseological View of Language. A Tribute to John Sinclair. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Textual Priming (Matthew Brook O’Donnell)

Drawing on Michael Hoey’s corpus-driven theory of Lexical Priming and specifically his claims regarding the associations that exist between lexical items (words and phrases) and text linguistic features (cohesion, text structure and clause relations), the Textual Priming Project at Liverpool University, UK carried out work on a corpus of newspaper text to test out the claim that:

‘Every word is primed to occur in, or avoid, certain positions within the discourse; these are its textual colligations’ (Hoey 2005).

We found a surprising number of words and clusters that exhibited particularly preferences for text-initial and paragraph-initial positions within newspaper text.

The next stage aims to extend the analysis and methodological framework to look at textual colligation in academic writing.

Related publications:

• Hoey, M. & M.B. O’Donnell (2008), ‘Lexicography, Grammar, and Textual Position’, International Journal of Lexicography 2008 21(3):293-309
• Mahberg, M. & M.B. O’Donnell (2008). ‛A fresh view of the structure of hard news stories’. In The 19th European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference and Workshop.
  http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2008/1700/
• Hoey, M. & M.B. O’Donnell (forthcoming). ‘The Beginning of something important?: Corpus evidence on the text beginnings of hard news stories’. In B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ed.), PALC 2007 (Practical Applications In Language Corpora: 7) , (Studies in Language; New York: Peter Lang)

The use of attended and unattended this in MICUSP (Stefanie Wulff, Ute Römer and John Swales)

In this project, we address a prominent topic in writing research and teaching: attended vs. unattended this. We revisit the variable realization of the demonstrative pronoun this attended by a noun or noun phrase, as in This behavior may also be due to the materials non-linearity, or standing alone, as in This may have implications for instructors who want students to produce academic text (examples taken from MICUSP). Our analyses of attended and unattended this in MICUSP show how a corpus approach can uncover aspects of the distribution, function and use of this language feature in apprentice academic writing across disciplines.

Related publications:

• Römer, U., Wulff, S. (2010). Applying corpus methods to writing research: Explorations of MICUSP. Journal of Writing Research 2(2): 99-127. http://jowr.org.
• Wulff, S., Römer, U., Swales, J. (Forthcoming). Attended/unattended this in student academic writing: Quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.

Research on proficient student writing across disciplines and levels (Annelie Ädel and Ute Römer)

In this project we investigate citation practices and phraseological items in MICUSP and compare their use across academic disciplines and student levels.

Related publications:
Ädel, A. & U. Römer. (Submitted). Research on proficient writing across disciplines and student levels: Introducing the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers.

Adult language acquisition (Nick C. Ellis)

Nick Ellis has been awarded NSF funding to research adult language acquisition in terms of the cognitive psychology of learning and transfer. This research bridges the psychologies of learning and development, cognitive science, linguistics, language acquisition, and education. Our interdisciplinary team here at the ELI and at Penn State University brings together psychology, applied linguistics, and second language acquisition and instruction to adopt a variety of triangulating methods: laboratory learning of temporal reference in a small subset of Latin under experimental conditions, eye-movement studies of attention in reading second language Spanish, analyses of development in regular university Spanish foreign language courses, training studies, and the development of classroom/language-lab based foreign language instructional interventions.

The acquisition of English verb-argument constructions (Nick C. Ellis, Matthew Brook O’Donnell and Ute Römer)

This project investigates the naturalistic second language acquisition of English verb-argument constructions (VACs: VL verb locative, VOL verb object locative, VOO ditransitive) with particular reference to: (1) Construction learning as concept learning following the general cognitive and associative processes of the induction of categories from experience of exemplars in usage obtained through interaction with conversation partners; (2) The empirical analysis of naturalistic usage by means of corpus linguistic descriptions of native speakers and non-native speech and of longitudinal acquisition (the interlanguage of second language learners); (3) The effects of the frequency and Zipfian type/token frequency distribution of exemplars within the Verb and other islands of the construction archipelago (e.g. [Subj V Obj Oblpath/loc]), by their prototypicality, their generic coverage, and their contingency of form-function mapping, and (4) Computational (Emergent connectionist) models of these various factors as they play out in the emergence of constructions as generalized linguistic schema.
For more information see VAC project page.

Related publications:
Ellis, N.C. & M.B. O’Donnell (Forthcoming). Statistical construction learning: Does a Zipfian problem space ensure robust language learning? In J. Williams & J. Rebuschat (eds.) Statistical Learning and Language Acquisition, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

O’Donnell, M.B. & N.C. Ellis (2010). Towards an Inventory of English Verb Argument Constructions. Proceedings of Workshop on Extracting and Using Constructions in Computational Linguistics NAACL HLT2010: 9-16.

See also our Formulaic Language Project, a project on measuring and analysing phraseological items in corpora.