Contracted forms in LINDSEI and LOCNEC
(2011) 20 years of Learner Corpus Research: looking back, moving ahead — Location: Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) (15.September.2011)
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- Abstract
- The use of contracted forms of auxiliary verbs is widely presented as typical of informal speech (Biber et al. 1999, Carter and McCarthy 2005). Some studies have shown that learners of English appear to be somewhat reluctant to use contracted forms in informal spoken productions (De Cock 2007, Götz 2007). This paper sets out to investigate the use of contracted forms in native and non-native informal spoken English using two comparable corpora of informal interviews, namely LOCNEC (the Louvain Corpus of Native English Conversation, Centre for English Corpus Linguistics, Université catholique de Louvain) and the recently published LINDSEI CD-ROM (Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage, Gilquin et al. 2010). The focus is on verb contractions (BE, HAVE, will and would) with pronoun subjects (I’m, you’ve, it’s, we’ll, they’re, etc.) in LOCNEC and in the various subcorpora included on the LINDSEI CD-ROM (spoken productions by learners from eleven mother tongue backgrounds: Bulgarian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish and Swedish). The corpora used contain between 60,000 and 100,000 words of interviewee speech and the interviews all follow the same set pattern. The forms under study were retrieved from the corpora using the Concord tool in WordSmith Tools 4.0 (Scott 2004). The ’s and ’d forms were disambiguated manually as they can correspond to the verb forms is or has and had or would respectively. When investigating contracted forms in the varieties under study, proportionate frequency is taken into consideration, i.e. the frequency of occurrence of a contracted form (e.g. ’re) as a percentage of both its contracted and full occurrences (’re + are) (see Kjellmer 1997). Proportionate frequency makes it possible to compare the extent to which the contracted forms are used as the preferred forms by the speakers in the corpora. The results confirm learners’ reluctance to use contracted forms compared with the native speakers: overall there is a greater proportion of contracted forms in the native corpus than in the learner varieties. It is noteworthy that there are differences in the proportion of contracted forms used between the various learner varieties (e.g. higher proportions can be found in the Swedish and German components than in the Chinese component). The study also shows that the verbs under study can be seen to occur in their contracted forms to varying degrees (e.g. the learners tend to use greater proportions of BE contractions than HAVE or WILL contractions). The proportion of contracted forms involving BE and HAVE as lexical verbs vs. auxiliaries are examined as well. The paper then focuses on the contracted forms of BE in negative constructions and compares the use of ‘not-contractions’ with ‘operator contractions’ (i.e. it isn’t vs. it’s not) (Biber et al. 1999) in informal native and learner speech. Biber et al. (1999) and Carter and McCarthy (2005) have shown that ‘operator contraction’ is the preferred form when the subject is a pronoun and when the contracted form does not occur in clause-initial position. This study seeks to find out whether the use of ‘not-contractions’ and ‘operator contractions’ is determined by the same factors in LOCNEC and in the LINDSEI subcorpora. In an attempt to explore whether learners’ general underuse of contracted forms in informal speech could for example be connected with the type of input they are exposed to, the paper is concluded by an investigation of verb contractions with pronoun subjects in the TeMa corpus, a pedagogically annotated corpus of textbook materials (Meunier and Gouverneur 2007). The study examines the presence of contracted forms in listening comprehension transcripts and whether or not they are the focus of discussions and/or exercises in the textbooks.
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De Cock, S. (2011). Contracted forms in LINDSEI and LOCNEC. 20 years of Learner Corpus Research: looking back, moving ahead, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/158258