Expressing negation through morphology in learner English: A corpus-based study of transfer
(2016) SLE 2016: 49th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea — Location: University of Naples Federico II (31.August.2016)
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- (en) For a language learner, it is essential to be able to convey negative meanings. In English, one way of doing so, besides the use of the negative particle not, is to use words with negative affixes such as un– or –less (see e.g. Zimmer 1964, Funk 1971, Horn 2002, Hamawand 2009, Bauer et al. 2013, Andreou 2015 on negative affixation in native English). Learners of English, however, have been shown to generally underuse negative affixation in comparison with native speakers of English, and also sometimes to misuse it (Gilquin 2015). In this paper, we will seek to determine whether transfer from the mother tongue (L1) could be a plausible explanation for some of the learners’ problems in the use of negative affixation, despite the controversy surrounding the transfer of bound morphology (see De Angelis [2007: 54-57] for an overview). To do so, we combine insights from research on learner language and contrastive linguistics. Our study is corpus-based and relies on learner corpora, representing learners’ authentic production, and multilingual corpora, which allow for a systematic comparison between English and the learners’ L1. Preliminary results for French learners of English, based on data from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE, Granger et al. 2009), show that these learners most heavily underuse un–, a Germanic prefix (etymologically speaking). This trend ties in with a marked English-French contrast identified in a large-scale contrastive study (Lefer 2009): many un–words have no direct counterparts in French because of the high productivity of the English un– compared to French negative prefixes (e.g. unplanned vs. *implanifié). On the other hand, the negative affix that the learners most commonly use is in–, a Romance prefix that has an equivalent French cognate and is often used with base words of Latinate origin. Some of the errors French-speaking learners make also reveal traces of transfer, as illustrated by example (1), where the (incorrect) form deshumanised seems to be directly transferred from French déshumanisé. (1) They are living in a deshumanised world, where only productivity matters, where human relations and family life have become less important than money. (ICLE-FR-UCL-0091.3) Our study will be further expanded to Italian, Dutch and German learners of English. While Italian learners are expected to share some of the features outlined above, Dutch and German learners should present a different profile, influenced by their L1s (which include, for example, direct equivalents of un– and –less, unlike French and Italian). For these different learner populations, we will consider the negative meanings expressed by the affixes (contradiction/contrary vs. removal/reversal), the type of base word they attach to (part of speech, Germanic vs. Latinate origin), and the nature of the affixed form (lexicalized vs. creative).
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Gilquin, G., & Lefer, M.-A. (2016). Expressing negation through morphology in learner English: A corpus-based study of transfer. SLE 2016: 49th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, University of Naples Federico II. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/229722