The passive and the lexis-grammar interface: An inter-varietal perspective
(2020) 41st International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English Conference (ICAME 41) — Location: Digital Conference (20.May.2020)
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- Authors
Granger, Sylviane 
- Abstract
- The passive has traditionally been seen as a purely grammatical phenomenon, resulting from the transformation of an active sentence. Yet, some voices have arisen to show (i) that the distinction between the active and the passive is not a strict dichotomy, but a gradient (see Svartvik 1966; Quirk et al. 1985: 167ff.), and (ii) that the passive displays phraseological effects, with some verbs being more attracted to the passive voice than others (e.g. Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004; Granger 2013). This view, however, is still largely absent from the field of second language acquisition. In this presentation, we will adopt the view of the passive as a lexico-grammatical phenomenon to study different varieties of L2 English produced by learners from eight L1 backgrounds. The data come from the latest version of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLEv3; Granger et al. 2020). The methodology itself eschews a strictly grammatical definition of the passive by not only searching for the BE auxiliary followed by a past participle, but also including cases where BE is followed by a verbal form tagged as an adjective (e.g. 'BE concerned', 'BE involved'). For each verb and each learner population, we computed the passive ratio, which shows the degree to which a verb is attracted to the passive voice. These results were compared with similar data representing native student writing, taken from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). Our aim is to determine to what extent the passive forms found in native and learner English are strictly grammatical or lean more towards the phraseological end of the scale. The first results of the corpus study reveal that the passive is underused by learners, but that the frequency varies quite widely among the L1 populations (from 167 occurrences per 100,000 words among the Korean learners to 310 among the Dutch learners). The passive ratio also shows some variation, both between the verbs and the populations. Overall, for example, CONSIDER has a higher passive ratio in native English than in learner English, while it is the opposite with DESCRIBE. As for CONCERN, it has a particularly high passive ratio in the French component of ICLE. Such differences will be investigated from a more qualitative point of view, including an analysis of lexical bundles (e.g. 'as far as X is concerned') and of the possible impact of L2 exposure (compare, e.g., French and Norwegian learners).
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Gilquin, G., & Granger, S. (2020). The passive and the lexis-grammar interface: An inter-varietal perspective. 41st International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English Conference (ICAME 41), Digital Conference. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/216536