Do you love me: Interrogatives in learner speech in LINDSEI and in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus
(2022) 6th Learner Corpus Research Conference 2022 — Location: Padova (Italie) (22.September.2022)
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- The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI) contains informal interviews with intermediate to advanced level learners of English as a foreign language from a series of mother tongue backgrounds. However informal these interviews may be, they do not share two of Clark’s (1996) typical features of face-to-face conversation, namely self-determination and self-expression. While the free exchange of turns is a fundamental organising factor of conversations, in interviews the participants do not determine for themselves what actions to take when. Instead of being locally managed as in conversations (Lazaraton 1992), the turn-taking system is pre-specified: interviews are organised according to a question-answer format. Besides taking actions as themselves (Clarke’s self-expression) the participants in an interview also take actions as interviewer or interviewee. As Fiksdal (1990) points out, the participants have rights and obligations as interviewer or interviewee: the interviewer has the right and obligation to ask questions and the interviewee has the obligation to answer these questions. This paper reports on research into the use of interrogative clauses, and more specifically Wh-questions and yes/no-questions (Biber et al. 1999), by the learner interviewees in four of the subcorpora included on the LINDSEI CD-ROM (Gilquin et al. 2010). The following research questions are addressed: (1) to what extent do the learner interviewees use interrogatives in a context which arguably does not foster the use of these structures (and how does this use compare with the use of interrogatives in spontaneous conversations reported by Biber et al. 1999), and (2) what are the discourse/pragmatic functions of the interrogatives used by the interviewees? The four corpora investigated represent very different mother tongue backgrounds, namely LINDSEI_Chinese, LINDSEI_Dutch, LINDSEI_French and LINDSEI_Polish. They contain between c. 60,000 and 90,000 words of interviewee speech and the interviews all follow the same set pattern. The Concord tool in WordSmith Tools 8.0 is used to retrieve the instances of wh-words and primary and secondary auxiliaries from the interviewee turns. The automatic retrieval is followed by careful analysis of the concordance lines to uncover the actual Wh-questions and yes/no-questions in the data. The paper focuses more particularly on the discourse/pragmatic functions of the interrogatives uncovered in the data. The following four main discourse/pragmatic functions have been identified in the LINDSEI data: direct speech/thought reporting (e.g. why do you have this American accent like that, do you love me ), speech management (Allwood et al. 1990, Rühlemann 2006; e.g. what else did we do and direct appeals for assistance like how do you call that in (.) in English, Tarone et al. 1983), elicitation of information from the interviewer (for example to assess or establish common ground; were you there as well) and interview/task-oriented metadiscursive function (e.g. is it anonymous, can I start). In a second part, the paper explores the extent to which interrogatives are used to a similar extent and with similar pragmatic/discourse functions by learners in the Conversation and Discussion subset of the Trinity Lancaster Corpus. The Trinity Lancaster Corpus (henceforth TLC, Gablasova et al. 2019) includes spoken data produced by learners of English from over ten different mother tongue backgrounds within the framework of the Graded Examinations of Spoken English (developed and organised by Trinity College London). The Conversation and Discussion subset features data produced by learners taking the spoken English exam in the context of speaking tasks which have been characterised as both dialogic and jointly-led (Gablasova et al. 2019). The main focus in on a qualitative functional analysis of the interrogatives used by the learners in the TLC and LINDSEI data under study and discusses the impact of differences in the formality of the setting (semi-formal in the TLC vs. more informal in LINDSEI, Gablasova et al. 2019), in speaker roles (candidate and examiner in the TLC vs. interviewee and interviewer in LINDSEI) and in turn-taking format (jointly-led interaction - Gablasova et al. 2019 - vs. question and answer format in LINDSEI). References: Allwood, J., Nivre, J. & Ahlsén, E. (1990). Speech management: on the non-written life of speech. Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 13, 3–48. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & E. Finegan (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Clark, H. H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fiksdal, S. (1990). The Right Time and Pace: A Microanalysis of Cross-cultural Gatekeeping Interviews. New Jersey: Ablex Norwood. Gablasova, D., Brezina, V. & McEnery, T. (2019) The Trinity Lancaster Corpus. Development, description and application. Interntional Journal of Learner Corpus Research, 5(2), 126-158. Gilquin, G., De Cock, S. & S. Granger (Eds.) (2010). The Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage. Handbook and CD-ROM. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain. Lazaraton, A. (1992). The Structural Organization of a language Interview: A Conversation Analytic Perspective. System, 20(3), 373-386. Rühlemann, C. (2006) Coming to terms with conversational grammar: ‘Dislocation’ and ‘dysfluency’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 11 (4), 385–409. Tarone, E., Cohen, A., & Dumas, G. (1983). A Closer Look at Some Interlanguage Terminology: A Framework for Communication Strategies. In Faerch, C. & G. Kasper (Eds.). Strategies in Interlanguage Communication. London: Longman, 4-14.
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De Cock, S. (2022). Do you love me: Interrogatives in learner speech in LINDSEI and in the Trinity Lancaster Corpus. 6th Learner Corpus Research Conference 2022, Padova (Italie). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/106883