Cristóbal Lozano (PhD Essex) is associate professor in Applied Linguistics (Second Language Acquisition) at the Universidad de Granada. His research interests are Second Language Acquisition, Bilingualism, and Learner Corpus Research. He is currently interested in the acquisition and processing of anaphora resolution (ANACOREX project) and is director of the CEDEL2 corpus (http://cedel2.learnercorpora.com). More info at: https://wpd.ugr.es/~cristoballozano
This study investigates the acquisition of anaphora resolution (AR) in Spanish as a second langua... more This study investigates the acquisition of anaphora resolution (AR) in Spanish as a second language (L2). According to the Position of Antecedent Strategy (PAS), in native Spanish null pronominal subjects are biased toward subject antecedents, whereas overt pronominal subjects show a “flexible” bias (typically toward non-subject but also toward subject antecedents). The PAS has been extensively investigated in experimental studies, though little is known about real production. We show how naturalistic production (corpus methods) can uncover crucial factors in the PAS that have not been explored in the experimental literature. We analyzed written samples from the CEDEL2 corpus: L1 English-L2 Spanish adult late-bilingual learners (intermediate, lower-advanced and upper-advanced proficiency levels) and a control group of adult Spanish monolinguals (N = 75 texts). Anaphors were manually annotated via a fine-grained, linguistically-motivated tagset in UAM Corpus Tool. Against traditional...
Applied Linguistics Now Recurso Electronico Understanding Language and Mind La Linguistica Aplicada Actual Comprendiendo El Lenguaje Y La Mente 2009 Isbn 978 84 692 1479 4 Pags 197 212, 2009
This paper shows how corpus and experimental data can be combined to gain an insight into the pro... more This paper shows how corpus and experimental data can be combined to gain an insight into the processes that shape and constrain second language (L2) acquisition, by focusing on the L1 Spanish - L2 English acquisition of preverbal vs. post-verbal subject position: S-V vs. (XP-)V-S. The initial corpus study (Lozano & Mendikoetxea 2010) revealed that subject position in L1 Spanish - L2 English is constrained by the same principles as in native English (verb type, information structure and phonological weight), but learners show difficulties with the preverbal XP constituent: even advanced learners overuse it as the generic expletive (It occurred many important events) or omit XP (i.e., they use O as in Exist other means of obtaining money), while the use of there with verbs other than be is highly limited (There exist about two hundred organizations). To (dis)confirm these corpus findings, a follow-up online experiment was designed to test learners' (N=250) knowledge of the prever...
In this paper, we examine the production of Verb-Subject order in the Spanish and Italian subcorp... more In this paper, we examine the production of Verb-Subject order in the Spanish and Italian subcorpora of ICLE. Our findings confirm that learners produce postverbal subjects only with unaccusative verbs (never with unergatives or with transitives) as reported in previous research. However, we show that unaccusativity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for postverbal subject production, since, crucially, there is a tendency for the postverbal subject to be heavy (i.e., phonologically long) and focus (i.e., discourse-new information). Thus, a full account of the production of inverted subjects in L2 English must look at properties which operate at the interfaces: (i) the lexicon-syntax interface (i.e., unaccusativity), (ii) the syntax-phonology interface (i.e., weight), and (iii) the syntax-discourse interface (i.e., focus).
This book investigates the acquisition of syntactic and discursive properties by adult learners o... more This book investigates the acquisition of syntactic and discursive properties by adult learners of non-native Spanish. In particular, two properties of the pro-drop parameter are explored: overt and null pronominal subjects and unaccusative subject-verb inversion. These two properties are constrained by syntactic (formal) properties of Universal Grammar (UG) and, at the same time, by language-specific discursive properties (topic and focus). The study argues that formal and syntactic properties which are constrained by UG are acquired earlier than discursive properties, which pose persistent problems for learners. Results from experiments on pronominal subjects and word order confirm that both English and Greek advanced learners of non-native Spanish show convergent (native-like) intuitions with respect to the syntactic and formal principles of UG, while showing divergent and optional intuitions with language-specific discursive properties (information structure: topic and focus).
Anaphora Resolution (AR) is a pervasive phenomenon in natural languages. AR relates to how referr... more Anaphora Resolution (AR) is a pervasive phenomenon in natural languages. AR relates to how referring expressions (REs) (e.g., null/overt subject pronouns, and NPs) corefer with their antecedents in discourse. We use corpus methods to simultaneously compare AR in two null-subject languages (Spanish vs. Greek). We analyse a Spanish-native sample (CEDEL2 corpus, N=341 REs analysed) and an equally-designed Greek-native sample (GLC corpus, N=400 REs analysed), while keeping constant the text type (Chaplin narrative task), the annotation scheme (tagset), the tagging procedure, and the profile of the natives. Our corpus results reveal similarities in the way Spanish and Greek natives construct their narratives regarding the distribution of the information status of the REs (topic continuity/shift) and the distribution of characters (main/secondary) in discourse. Crucially, our two languages differ in relation to topicality (Greek capitalises on discourse topic whereas Spanish relies more o...
Despite the burgeoning field of Spanish second language acquisition (SLA) research, large Spanish... more Despite the burgeoning field of Spanish second language acquisition (SLA) research, large Spanish learner corpora (LC) are not common practice yet. We present a general yet practical introduction to the multiple decisions Spanish as a second language (L2) researchers should consider before creating their own LC. We focus on (i) two freely available Spanish LC (CEDEL2 and COWS-L2H), (ii) their general design principles, (iii) crucial variables to collect (learner and task variables), (iv) ways of collecting and compiling LC data, and (v) the final product (the corpus interface). We explore different ways of interrogating the two corpora, illustrating them with specific (morpho)syntactic and lexical examples from L2 Spanish, as well as potential curricular and teaching applications of LC. We conclude with a recommendation for the triangulation of LC data with experimental research and a summary of future directions that the field of LC research may take. Our ultimate aim is to equip researchers with the basic theoretical and methodological tools to design, build and collect their own LC.
Despite the burgeoning field of Spanish second language acquisition (SLA) research, large Spanish... more Despite the burgeoning field of Spanish second language acquisition (SLA) research, large Spanish learner corpora (LC) are not common practice yet. We present a general yet practical introduction to the multiple decisions Spanish as a second language (L2) researchers should consider before creating their own LC. We focus on (i) two freely available Spanish LC (CEDEL2 and COWS-L2H), (ii) their general design principles, (iii) crucial variables to collect (learner and task variables), (iv) ways of collecting and compiling LC data, and (v) the final product (the corpus interface). We explore different ways of interrogating the two corpora, illustrating them with specific (morpho)syntactic and lexical examples from L2 Spanish, as well as potential curricular and teaching applications of LC. We conclude with a recommendation for the triangulation of LC data with experimental research and a summary of future directions that the field of LC research may take. Our ultimate aim is to equip researchers with the basic theoretical and methodological tools to design, build and collect their own LC.
The Role of Formal Features in Second Language Acquisition, 2008
The chapter by Hawkins at al. begins by noting that previous investigations of verb raising have ... more The chapter by Hawkins at al. begins by noting that previous investigations of verb raising have only considered the syntactic reflexes (i.e., whether the verb moves to T) and have not looked at its semantic consequences. Where raising exists, a sentence in the simple present is compatible with an event/progressive interpretation. In a language like Modern English, which does not have (main) verb raising, such an interpretation is not possible; the simple present always invites a generic habitual interpretation as shown by the grammaticality of John eats a donut every morning versus the ungrammatically of *John eats a donut right now. The investigation required the subjects to judge the appropriateness of several continuations in contexts that bias either for a progressive or a generic interpretation. Subjects for this study were highly advanced learners of English, split between L1s that have no verb raising (Japanese and Chinese) and L1s that do (Arabic, French, German, and Spanish). Production shows that the progressive/habitual interpretation is mastered by all subjects, but the underlying competence that leads to that distinction is different depending on the group. Japanese and Chinese speakers differ from the native control and the v-raising groups in that they are less willing to accept eventive readings with achievement predicates than with activities. The native control group and the v-raising group are different in that the latter accepts the progressive as having an habitual interpretation, a result that was not expected and which is explained as lack of knowledge that the progressive is an independent category. The authors conclude, similar in spirit to Tsimpli and Mastropauvlou, that uninterpretable features not present in the L1 cannot be successfully incorporated into the L2 grammar due to critical period effects.
Linking up contrastive and learner corpus research, 2008
The purpose of this article is to characterise the production of postverbal subjects in two ICLE ... more The purpose of this article is to characterise the production of postverbal subjects in two ICLE subcorpora (Italian and Spanish). The question has been dealt with before in the literature with emphasis on the production of ngrammatical inversion structures in L2 English of speakers from a variety of L1s, but in quite a scattered, unsystematic and rather intuitive fashion. Our approach seeks to identify the conditions under which learners produce inverted subjects. Based on previous research findings and our review of the theoretical literature, we hypothesise that for Spanish and Italian learners of L2 English, there is a tendency for subject inversion to occur when: the verb is unaccusative (H1), the subject is long or “heavy” (H2), and the subject is new (or relatively new) information or “focus” (H3). While H1 has found confirmation in the L2 literature, H2 and H3 have, to our knowledge, been untested and the facts they describe gone unnoticed in previous research. Our results show that the three conditions are met in the writing of Spanish and Italian L2 speakers of English, despite errors in the syntactic encoding of the structures concerned. Thus, a full account of the production of inverted subjects in L2 English must look at properties which operate at (i) the lexicon-syntax interface, (ii) the syntaxphonology interface, and (iii) the syntax-discourse interface.
Applied Linguistics Now: Understanding Language and Mind / La Lingüística Aplicada Hoy: Comprendiendo el Lenguaje y la Mente. Almería: Universidad de Almería, 2009
Debido al auge de estudios formales de adquisición del español L2 en los
últimos años, CEDEL2 su... more Debido al auge de estudios formales de adquisición del español L2 en los
últimos años, CEDEL2 surge para dar respuesta a esta creciente necesidad investigadora y así proporcionar una gran cantidad de datos en español L2. CEDEL es parte del proyecto Word Order in Second Language Acquisition Corpora (WOSLAC), cuyo objetivo principal es determinar las propiedades que operan en las interfaces (léxico-sintaxis y sintaxis-discurso) y que restringen el orden de palabras en español L2
Revista da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, 2021
This paper presents the L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus of Corpus Escrito del Español L2 (CE... more This paper presents the L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus of Corpus Escrito del Español L2 (CEDEL2), a new methodological resource for second language acquisition (SLA) research, which is freely searchable and downloadable (http://cedel2.learnercorpora.com). CEDEL2 is a large-scale, multi-L1 learner corpus of L2 Spanish which contains written productions from learners at all proficiency levels as well as 6 native control subcorpora (total size: over 1,100,000 words from over 4,000 participants). CEDEL2 follows strict corpus design criteria (Sinclair, 2005) and learner corpus design recommendations (Tracy-Ventura & Paquot, 2021a). In its current version (CEDEL2 v. 2), its Portuguese component includes an L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus, with 21,662 words written by 164 participants, and an L1 Portuguese native subcorpus, with 3,500 words from 16 L1 speakers of European Portuguese. Thanks to their design features (e.g., same design across subcorpora, inclusion of metadata abou...
The Handbook of Advanced Proficiency in Second Language Acquisition, 2018
One of the final hurdles for advanced L2 learners is the acquisition of lexico- and morphosyntact... more One of the final hurdles for advanced L2 learners is the acquisition of lexico- and morphosyntactic alternations when constrained by information-structure (IS) factors like topic and focus that are located at the interface of grammar and discourse. Departing from two broad research traditions in SLA (formal and functional) we review how advanced and near-native learners of different L2s deal with IS management. We discuss the reasons why they often fail to acquire the discursive nuances associated with IS-constrained phenomena like pronominal subject distribution, postverbal subjects, clefting, left dislocation, focus fronting, raising, and other types of lexicogrammatical variation. We conclude by proposing that a methodological triangulation between corpus and experimental data is needed to better understand IS phenomena in L2 acquisition in the future.
This study investigates the acquisition of anaphora resolution (AR) in Spanish as a second langua... more This study investigates the acquisition of anaphora resolution (AR) in Spanish as a second language (L2). According to the Position of Antecedent Strategy (PAS), in native Spanish null pronominal subjects are biased toward subject antecedents, whereas overt pronominal subjects show a “flexible” bias (typically toward non-subject but also toward subject antecedents). The PAS has been extensively investigated in experimental studies, though little is known about real production. We show how naturalistic production (corpus methods) can uncover crucial factors in the PAS that have not been explored in the experimental literature. We analyzed written samples from the CEDEL2 corpus: L1 English-L2 Spanish adult late-bilingual learners (intermediate, lower-advanced and upper-advanced proficiency levels) and a control group of adult Spanish monolinguals (N = 75 texts). Anaphors were manually annotated via a fine-grained, linguistically-motivated tagset in UAM Corpus Tool. Against traditional...
Applied Linguistics Now Recurso Electronico Understanding Language and Mind La Linguistica Aplicada Actual Comprendiendo El Lenguaje Y La Mente 2009 Isbn 978 84 692 1479 4 Pags 197 212, 2009
This paper shows how corpus and experimental data can be combined to gain an insight into the pro... more This paper shows how corpus and experimental data can be combined to gain an insight into the processes that shape and constrain second language (L2) acquisition, by focusing on the L1 Spanish - L2 English acquisition of preverbal vs. post-verbal subject position: S-V vs. (XP-)V-S. The initial corpus study (Lozano & Mendikoetxea 2010) revealed that subject position in L1 Spanish - L2 English is constrained by the same principles as in native English (verb type, information structure and phonological weight), but learners show difficulties with the preverbal XP constituent: even advanced learners overuse it as the generic expletive (It occurred many important events) or omit XP (i.e., they use O as in Exist other means of obtaining money), while the use of there with verbs other than be is highly limited (There exist about two hundred organizations). To (dis)confirm these corpus findings, a follow-up online experiment was designed to test learners' (N=250) knowledge of the prever...
In this paper, we examine the production of Verb-Subject order in the Spanish and Italian subcorp... more In this paper, we examine the production of Verb-Subject order in the Spanish and Italian subcorpora of ICLE. Our findings confirm that learners produce postverbal subjects only with unaccusative verbs (never with unergatives or with transitives) as reported in previous research. However, we show that unaccusativity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for postverbal subject production, since, crucially, there is a tendency for the postverbal subject to be heavy (i.e., phonologically long) and focus (i.e., discourse-new information). Thus, a full account of the production of inverted subjects in L2 English must look at properties which operate at the interfaces: (i) the lexicon-syntax interface (i.e., unaccusativity), (ii) the syntax-phonology interface (i.e., weight), and (iii) the syntax-discourse interface (i.e., focus).
This book investigates the acquisition of syntactic and discursive properties by adult learners o... more This book investigates the acquisition of syntactic and discursive properties by adult learners of non-native Spanish. In particular, two properties of the pro-drop parameter are explored: overt and null pronominal subjects and unaccusative subject-verb inversion. These two properties are constrained by syntactic (formal) properties of Universal Grammar (UG) and, at the same time, by language-specific discursive properties (topic and focus). The study argues that formal and syntactic properties which are constrained by UG are acquired earlier than discursive properties, which pose persistent problems for learners. Results from experiments on pronominal subjects and word order confirm that both English and Greek advanced learners of non-native Spanish show convergent (native-like) intuitions with respect to the syntactic and formal principles of UG, while showing divergent and optional intuitions with language-specific discursive properties (information structure: topic and focus).
Anaphora Resolution (AR) is a pervasive phenomenon in natural languages. AR relates to how referr... more Anaphora Resolution (AR) is a pervasive phenomenon in natural languages. AR relates to how referring expressions (REs) (e.g., null/overt subject pronouns, and NPs) corefer with their antecedents in discourse. We use corpus methods to simultaneously compare AR in two null-subject languages (Spanish vs. Greek). We analyse a Spanish-native sample (CEDEL2 corpus, N=341 REs analysed) and an equally-designed Greek-native sample (GLC corpus, N=400 REs analysed), while keeping constant the text type (Chaplin narrative task), the annotation scheme (tagset), the tagging procedure, and the profile of the natives. Our corpus results reveal similarities in the way Spanish and Greek natives construct their narratives regarding the distribution of the information status of the REs (topic continuity/shift) and the distribution of characters (main/secondary) in discourse. Crucially, our two languages differ in relation to topicality (Greek capitalises on discourse topic whereas Spanish relies more o...
Despite the burgeoning field of Spanish second language acquisition (SLA) research, large Spanish... more Despite the burgeoning field of Spanish second language acquisition (SLA) research, large Spanish learner corpora (LC) are not common practice yet. We present a general yet practical introduction to the multiple decisions Spanish as a second language (L2) researchers should consider before creating their own LC. We focus on (i) two freely available Spanish LC (CEDEL2 and COWS-L2H), (ii) their general design principles, (iii) crucial variables to collect (learner and task variables), (iv) ways of collecting and compiling LC data, and (v) the final product (the corpus interface). We explore different ways of interrogating the two corpora, illustrating them with specific (morpho)syntactic and lexical examples from L2 Spanish, as well as potential curricular and teaching applications of LC. We conclude with a recommendation for the triangulation of LC data with experimental research and a summary of future directions that the field of LC research may take. Our ultimate aim is to equip researchers with the basic theoretical and methodological tools to design, build and collect their own LC.
Despite the burgeoning field of Spanish second language acquisition (SLA) research, large Spanish... more Despite the burgeoning field of Spanish second language acquisition (SLA) research, large Spanish learner corpora (LC) are not common practice yet. We present a general yet practical introduction to the multiple decisions Spanish as a second language (L2) researchers should consider before creating their own LC. We focus on (i) two freely available Spanish LC (CEDEL2 and COWS-L2H), (ii) their general design principles, (iii) crucial variables to collect (learner and task variables), (iv) ways of collecting and compiling LC data, and (v) the final product (the corpus interface). We explore different ways of interrogating the two corpora, illustrating them with specific (morpho)syntactic and lexical examples from L2 Spanish, as well as potential curricular and teaching applications of LC. We conclude with a recommendation for the triangulation of LC data with experimental research and a summary of future directions that the field of LC research may take. Our ultimate aim is to equip researchers with the basic theoretical and methodological tools to design, build and collect their own LC.
The Role of Formal Features in Second Language Acquisition, 2008
The chapter by Hawkins at al. begins by noting that previous investigations of verb raising have ... more The chapter by Hawkins at al. begins by noting that previous investigations of verb raising have only considered the syntactic reflexes (i.e., whether the verb moves to T) and have not looked at its semantic consequences. Where raising exists, a sentence in the simple present is compatible with an event/progressive interpretation. In a language like Modern English, which does not have (main) verb raising, such an interpretation is not possible; the simple present always invites a generic habitual interpretation as shown by the grammaticality of John eats a donut every morning versus the ungrammatically of *John eats a donut right now. The investigation required the subjects to judge the appropriateness of several continuations in contexts that bias either for a progressive or a generic interpretation. Subjects for this study were highly advanced learners of English, split between L1s that have no verb raising (Japanese and Chinese) and L1s that do (Arabic, French, German, and Spanish). Production shows that the progressive/habitual interpretation is mastered by all subjects, but the underlying competence that leads to that distinction is different depending on the group. Japanese and Chinese speakers differ from the native control and the v-raising groups in that they are less willing to accept eventive readings with achievement predicates than with activities. The native control group and the v-raising group are different in that the latter accepts the progressive as having an habitual interpretation, a result that was not expected and which is explained as lack of knowledge that the progressive is an independent category. The authors conclude, similar in spirit to Tsimpli and Mastropauvlou, that uninterpretable features not present in the L1 cannot be successfully incorporated into the L2 grammar due to critical period effects.
Linking up contrastive and learner corpus research, 2008
The purpose of this article is to characterise the production of postverbal subjects in two ICLE ... more The purpose of this article is to characterise the production of postverbal subjects in two ICLE subcorpora (Italian and Spanish). The question has been dealt with before in the literature with emphasis on the production of ngrammatical inversion structures in L2 English of speakers from a variety of L1s, but in quite a scattered, unsystematic and rather intuitive fashion. Our approach seeks to identify the conditions under which learners produce inverted subjects. Based on previous research findings and our review of the theoretical literature, we hypothesise that for Spanish and Italian learners of L2 English, there is a tendency for subject inversion to occur when: the verb is unaccusative (H1), the subject is long or “heavy” (H2), and the subject is new (or relatively new) information or “focus” (H3). While H1 has found confirmation in the L2 literature, H2 and H3 have, to our knowledge, been untested and the facts they describe gone unnoticed in previous research. Our results show that the three conditions are met in the writing of Spanish and Italian L2 speakers of English, despite errors in the syntactic encoding of the structures concerned. Thus, a full account of the production of inverted subjects in L2 English must look at properties which operate at (i) the lexicon-syntax interface, (ii) the syntaxphonology interface, and (iii) the syntax-discourse interface.
Applied Linguistics Now: Understanding Language and Mind / La Lingüística Aplicada Hoy: Comprendiendo el Lenguaje y la Mente. Almería: Universidad de Almería, 2009
Debido al auge de estudios formales de adquisición del español L2 en los
últimos años, CEDEL2 su... more Debido al auge de estudios formales de adquisición del español L2 en los
últimos años, CEDEL2 surge para dar respuesta a esta creciente necesidad investigadora y así proporcionar una gran cantidad de datos en español L2. CEDEL es parte del proyecto Word Order in Second Language Acquisition Corpora (WOSLAC), cuyo objetivo principal es determinar las propiedades que operan en las interfaces (léxico-sintaxis y sintaxis-discurso) y que restringen el orden de palabras en español L2
Revista da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, 2021
This paper presents the L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus of Corpus Escrito del Español L2 (CE... more This paper presents the L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus of Corpus Escrito del Español L2 (CEDEL2), a new methodological resource for second language acquisition (SLA) research, which is freely searchable and downloadable (http://cedel2.learnercorpora.com). CEDEL2 is a large-scale, multi-L1 learner corpus of L2 Spanish which contains written productions from learners at all proficiency levels as well as 6 native control subcorpora (total size: over 1,100,000 words from over 4,000 participants). CEDEL2 follows strict corpus design criteria (Sinclair, 2005) and learner corpus design recommendations (Tracy-Ventura & Paquot, 2021a). In its current version (CEDEL2 v. 2), its Portuguese component includes an L1 Portuguese – L2 Spanish subcorpus, with 21,662 words written by 164 participants, and an L1 Portuguese native subcorpus, with 3,500 words from 16 L1 speakers of European Portuguese. Thanks to their design features (e.g., same design across subcorpora, inclusion of metadata abou...
The Handbook of Advanced Proficiency in Second Language Acquisition, 2018
One of the final hurdles for advanced L2 learners is the acquisition of lexico- and morphosyntact... more One of the final hurdles for advanced L2 learners is the acquisition of lexico- and morphosyntactic alternations when constrained by information-structure (IS) factors like topic and focus that are located at the interface of grammar and discourse. Departing from two broad research traditions in SLA (formal and functional) we review how advanced and near-native learners of different L2s deal with IS management. We discuss the reasons why they often fail to acquire the discursive nuances associated with IS-constrained phenomena like pronominal subject distribution, postverbal subjects, clefting, left dislocation, focus fronting, raising, and other types of lexicogrammatical variation. We conclude by proposing that a methodological triangulation between corpus and experimental data is needed to better understand IS phenomena in L2 acquisition in the future.
The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd Edition). Oxford: Elsevier, 2006
This article examines how developmental patterns found in second language (L2) acquisition result... more This article examines how developmental patterns found in second language (L2) acquisition result from a complex interaction of influence from the first language (L1) and input from the L2 under constraints imposed by an innate language faculty. Evidence comes from a large body of research on L2 phonology, morphology and syntax.
EUROSLA Yearbook: Volume 2. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002
This study tests the assumption in much of the literature on the second language acquisition of E... more This study tests the assumption in much of the literature on the second language acquisition of English tense and aspect morphophonology (e.g. bare verbs, V-ing, V-ed) that once speakers are beyond intermediate levels of proficiency, both distribution and interpretation of these forms are represented in a target-like way in their mental grammars. Three groups of advanced non-native speakers (whose L1s were Chinese, Japanese and the verb-raising languages Arabic, French, German and Spanish) were compared with native speakers on an acceptability judgement task requiring informants to judge the appropriateness of sentences involving different verb forms to contexts which privileged specific interpretations. The results suggest an effect of the persistent influence of parametric differences between languages such that where parametrised grammatical properties are not activated in the L1, they are not available for the construction of representations in the L2.
Nuevas tendencias en la investigación lingüística. Granada: Método Ediciones, 2002
Evidence in recent second language research (SLR) leads to an apparent contradiction. While some ... more Evidence in recent second language research (SLR) leads to an apparent contradiction. While some studies claim that advanced adult learners can indeed achieve native-like competence, other studies suggest that they only achieve nearnative competence. The former studies focus on universal principles of universal grammar (UG), whereas the latter investigate properties which UG allows to vary (within limits) and attribute lack of native-like competence to L1 influence on the L2. In this study we investigate whether this is the expected pattern, i.e., that advanced L2 speakers will always show native-like competence where principles are involved, yet near-nativeness where the L1 differs parametrically from the L1 with respect to functional features. An experimental study consisting of three groups ((i) English and (ii) Greek natives learners of Spanish as L2 and L3 respectively and (ii) Spanish natives) were tested on some pronominal constructions where the presence of overt and null pr...
Adquisición y enseñanza de lenguas en contextos plurilingües: Ensayos y propuestas aplicadas. Universitat de les Illes Balears: Servei de Publicacions i Intercamvi Científic, 2006
Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference 2007, University of Birmingham, 2007
This paper reports on work in progress under the framework of a research project investigating th... more This paper reports on work in progress under the framework of a research project investigating the acquisition of word order in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), based on two written learner corpora of L2 English and L2 Spanish. We will discuss (i) the motivation and objectives of the project (ii) data collection (iii) query software and (iv) data analysis. The purpose of the three-year project is to determine the properties which constrain word order in the interlanguage of L2 learners of English (with L1 Spanish) and L2 learners of Spanish (with L1 English). We examine both lexicon-syntax and syntax-discourse properties in the analysis of non-canonical word order structures in learner English and learner Spanish (right-periphery of the clause, left-periphery and ‘special’ constructions: passives, subject inversion and so on). Word order in English and Spanish differs significantly: in English word order is often said to be ‘fixed’, while Spanish allows for what is often referred to as ‘free order’. In languages with free word order, information structure properties and discourse properties in general play a crucial role in the position occupied by constituents in sentences. The two languages differ in the devices they employ to order constituents in the sentence. An in-depth investigation into word order in advanced learners of L2 English and L2 Spanish will thus offer answers to questions regarding the relative difficulty of acquiring lexical-syntactic and syntactic-discursive properties, as well as general issues related to L1 transfer and the occurrence of constructions which cannot be attributed to the L1 nor to the target language. Some of these issues have been explored in a preliminary analysis on the production of postverbal subjects in learner English (see Lozano & Mendikoetxea, forthcoming).
Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference. University of Birmingham, 2007
Though there is a long tradition of research into word order phenomena in Second Language (L2) ac... more Though there is a long tradition of research into word order phenomena in Second Language (L2) acquisition, this area of enquiry has recently been given a new impetus both from theoretical developments on the form-function interplay and, crucially, from the emergence of learner corpora This paper focuses on a particular phenomenon which has received considerable attention in the literature: the production of postverbal subjects in L2 English by L1 speakers of languages characterised as allowing ‘free inversion’ of the subject in V(erb) S(ubject) structures, such as Spanish and Italian. In previous research emphasis has been placed on the learners’ production of ungrammatical VS order (see for instance Rutherford, 1989 Zobl, 1989 and, more recently, Oshita, 2004). Our approach, however, seeks to identify the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic conditions, as well as conditions deriving from processing mechanisms, under which learners produce inverted subjects, regardless of errors resulting from the syntactic encoding of those notions. We analyse VS vs. SV structures in the Italian and Spanish subcorpus of ICLE (Grange et al., 2002) and we compare our results with preliminary results obtained from a similar native English corpus (LOCNESS). Thus, we incorporate some of the fundamental tenets of what is known as Contrastive Interlanguage Approach (see, e.g. Granger ,1996 and Gilquin, 2001), which establishes comparisons between: (a) native and non-native data, and (b) different non-native data. Our main purpose is to see if the properties that govern the occurrence of postverbal Ss in native English, as currently analysed in the theoretical and descriptive literature, are the same as those operating in the non-native grammars of Spanish and Italian speakers. We first examine the properties of VS order in English vs. Spanish/Italian (Section 2). In Section 3, we review previous L2 studies on postverbal Ss. Our hypotheses are presented in Section 4. Section 5 describes the method used to extract and code data from the corpus and their statistical treatment. Results are presented and discussed in Section 6. In Section 7, we compare learner data with data obtained from LOCNESS and Section 8 presents the conclusion.
25 años de Lingüística Aplicada en España: Hitos y retos / 25 Years of Applied Linguistics in Spain: Milestones and Challenges. Murcia: Editum, 2008
In this paper, we examine the production of Verb-Subject order in the Spanish and Italian subcorp... more In this paper, we examine the production of Verb-Subject order in the Spanish and Italian subcorpora of ICLE. Our findings confirm that learners produce postverbal subjects only with unaccusative verbs (never with unergatives or with transitives) as reported in previous research. However, we show that unaccusativity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for postverbal subject production, since, crucially, there is a tendency for the postverbal subject to be heavy (i.e., phonologically long) and focus (i.e., discourse-new information). Thus, a full account of the production of inverted subjects in L2 English must look at properties which operate at the interfaces: (i) the lexicon-syntax interface (i.e., unaccusativity), (ii) the syntax-phonology interface (i.e., weight), and (iii) the syntax-discourse interface (i.e., focus).
25 años de Lingüística Aplicada en España: Hitos y retos / 25 Years of Applied Linguistics in Spain: Milestones and Challenges. Murcia: Editum, 2008
Según recientes estudios psicolingüísticos, los aprendices adultos de una segunda lengua (L2) mue... more Según recientes estudios psicolingüísticos, los aprendices adultos de una segunda lengua (L2) muestran déficits de procesamiento (incluso en etapas de desarrollo muy avanzadas) ya que sus mecanismos para procesar el material lingüístico son ineficientes. Esta novedosa propuesta contrasta con estudios previos donde se arguye que tales déficits son el resultado de una pobre representación mental del material lingüístico.
En este estudio presentamos datos de la adquisición del español L2 por nativos de griego en el contexto de los mecanismos responsables de la resolución de anáfora. Los resultados demuestran que los déficits observados en los aprendices (incluso en niveles de competencia muy avanzada) se deben a un pobre procesamiento del material lingüístico en la interfaz entre el sistema computacional (sintaxis) y otros módulos de la mente (discurso), es decir, en la interfar sintaxis-discurso, y no a una pobre representación de los rasgos lingüísticos que operan en tal interfaz
The Acquisition of Syntax in Romance Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006
Recent acquisitional studies reveal that formal properties at the lexicon-syntax interface are in... more Recent acquisitional studies reveal that formal properties at the lexicon-syntax interface are in place before discursive properties at the syntax-discourse interface. It has been argued that this phenomenon results from learners’ deficits with interpretable discursive features like [focus]. This study claims that the phenomenon derives from learners’ deficits with the un-interpretable formal features responsible for regulating the occurrence of discursive focus, whereas learners’ representation of interpretable focus features are intact. This claimwas tested by conducting a study with Greek learners of non-native Spanish at three proficiency levels. Learners judged Subject-Verb and Verb-Subject order with intransitives (unergatives and unaccusatives), which is constrained both formally (Unaccusative Hypothesis at the lexicon-syntax interface) and discursively (presentational focus at the syntax-discourse interface). Results confirm that, while the general ‘syntax-before-discourse’ observation is correct, learners’ source of persistent deficits with discursive properties derives from the uninterpretable feature that regulates the syntactic realisation of focus. This implies that learners are sensitive to the (interpretable) [focus] feature, but are unable to grammaticalise it syntactically.
The Role of Formal Features in Second Language Acquisition. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates , 2008
The chapter by Hawkins at al. begins by noting that previous investigations of verb raising have ... more The chapter by Hawkins at al. begins by noting that previous investigations of verb raising have only considered the syntactic reflexes (i.e., whether the verb moves to T) and have not looked at its semantic consequences. Where raising exists, a sentence in the simple present is compatible with an event/progressive interpretation. In a language like Modern English, which does not have (main) verb raising, such an interpretation is not possible; the simple present always invites a generic habitual interpretation as shown by the grammaticality of John eats a donut every morning versus the ungrammatically of *John eats a donut right now. The investigation required the subjects to judge the appropriateness of several continuations in contexts that bias either for a progressive or a generic interpretation. Subjects for this study were highly advanced learners of English, split between L1s that have no verb raising (Japanese and Chinese) and L1s that do (Arabic, French, German, and Spanish). Production shows that the progressive/habitual interpretation is mastered by all subjects, but the underlying competence that leads to that distinction is different depending on the group. Japanese and Chinese speakers differ from the native control and the v-raising groups in that they are less willing to accept eventive readings with achievement predicates than with activities. The native control group and the v-raising group are different in that the latter accepts the progressive as having an habitual interpretation, a result that was not expected and which is explained as lack of knowledge that the progressive is an independent category. The authors conclude, similar in spirit to Tsimpli and Mastropauvlou, that uninterpretable features not present in the L1 cannot be successfully incorporated into the L2 grammar due to critical period effects.
Linking up Contrastive and Learner Corpus Research. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008
The purpose of this article is to characterise the production of postverbal subjects in two ICLE ... more The purpose of this article is to characterise the production of postverbal subjects in two ICLE subcorpora (Italian and Spanish). The question has been dealt with before in the literature with emphasis on the production of ngrammatical inversion structures in L2 English of speakers from a variety of L1s, but in quite a scattered, unsystematic and rather intuitive fashion. Our approach seeks to identify the conditions under which learners produce inverted subjects. Based on previous research findings and our review of the theoretical literature, we hypothesise that for Spanish and Italian learners of L2 English, there is a tendency for subject inversion to occur when: the verb is unaccusative (H1), the subject is long or “heavy” (H2), and the subject is new (or relatively new) information or “focus” (H3). While H1 has found confirmation in the L2 literature, H2 and H3 have, to our knowledge, been untested and the facts they describe gone unnoticed in previous research. Our results show that the three conditions are met in the writing of Spanish and Italian L2 speakers of English, despite errors in the syntactic encoding of the structures concerned. Thus, a full account of the production of inverted subjects in L2 English must look at properties which operate at (i) the lexicon-syntax interface, (ii) the syntaxphonology interface, and (iii) the syntax-discourse interface.
Applied Linguistics Now: Understanding Language and Mind / La Lingüística Aplicada Hoy: Comprendiendo el Lenguaje y la Mente. Almería: Universidad de Almería, 2009
Recent studies reveal that learners of L2 Spanish are sensitive to the formal syntactic mechanism... more Recent studies reveal that learners of L2 Spanish are sensitive to the formal syntactic mechanisms licensing overt and null pronominal subjects from early stages of acquisition, but they show residual deficits when their distribution is constrained by topic and focus at the syntax-discourse interface, even at advanced levels of proficiency. Importantly, previous research has assumed that all phi-features of the pronominal paradigm are equally vulnerable, but the current paper presents data from CEDEL2 showing that deficits are selective as they affect 3rd person animate features only.
Applied Linguistics Now: Understanding Language and Mind / La Lingüística Aplicada Hoy: Comprendiendo el Lenguaje y la Mente. Almería: Universidad de Almería, 2009
Debido al auge de estudios formales de adquisición del español L2 en los
últimos años, CEDEL2 sur... more Debido al auge de estudios formales de adquisición del español L2 en los últimos años, CEDEL2 surge para dar respuesta a esta creciente necesidad investigadora y así proporcionar una gran cantidad de datos en español L2. CEDEL es parte del proyecto Word Order in Second Language Acquisition Corpora (WOSLAC), cuyo objetivo principal es determinar las propiedades que operan en las interfaces (léxico-sintaxis y sintaxis-discurso) y que restringen el orden de palabras en español L2
Representational Deficits in SLA. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009
Previous research shows that English-speaking learners of Spanish show (i) early sensitivity to t... more Previous research shows that English-speaking learners of Spanish show (i) early sensitivity to the syntactic mechanisms licensing overt and null pronominal subjects, yet (i) persistent and long-lasting deficits when pronominal distribution is constrained by topic/focus at the syntax-discourse interface. It has been assumed that such vulnerability affects the whole set of phi-features of the pronominal paradigm, but I will use near-native corpus evidence to show that the observed deficits are selective, i.e., they do not affect the whole set of phi-features in the pronominal paradigm but rather a subset: due to their representational nature (which is constrained by Universal Grammar), only third person singular animate pronouns are targets for vulnerability, while the rest of the paradigm remains rather stable.
Twenty Years of Learner Corpus Research: Looking back, Moving ahead. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2013
This paper shows how corpus and experimental data can be combined to gain an insight into the pro... more This paper shows how corpus and experimental data can be combined to gain an insight into the processes that shape and constrain second language (L2) acquisition, by focusing on the L1 Spanish – L2 English acquisition of preverbal vs. post-verbal subject position: S-V vs. (XP-)V-S. The initial corpus study (Lozano & Mendikoetxea 2010) revealed that subject position in L1 Spanish – L2 English is constrained by the same principles as in native English (verb type, information structure and phonological weight), but learners show difficulties with the preverbal XP constituent: even advanced learners overuse it as the generic expletive (It occurred many important events) or omit XP (i.e., they use Ø as in Exist other means of obtaining money), while the use of there with verbs other than be is highly limited (There exist about two hundred organizations). To (dis)confirm these corpus findings, a follow-up online experiment was designed to test learners’ (N=250) knowledge of the preverbal XP element in XP-V-S structures whose design was structurally similar to those produced in the corpora (Ø/it/there/PP-V-S). The experimental results show a very robust pattern, which mostly confirms the corpus results. In the conclusion we advocate for the combined use of naturalistic and experimental data in a cyclic fashion.
Automatic Treatment and Analysis of Learner Corpus Data. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013
Second language acquisition (SLA) research has traditionally relied on elicited experimental data... more Second language acquisition (SLA) research has traditionally relied on elicited experimental data, and it has disfavoured natural language use data. Learner corpus research has the potential to change this but, to date, the research has contributed little to the interpretation of L2 acquisition, and some of the corpora are flawed in design. We analyse the reasons why many SLA researchers are still reticent about using corpora, and how good corpus design and adequate tools to annotate and search corpora can help overcome some of the problems observed. We do so by describing how the ten standard principles used in corpus design (Sinclair 2005) were applied to the design of CEDEL2, a large learner corpus of L1 English – L2 Spanish (Lozano 2009a).
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Papers by Cristóbal Lozano
últimos años, CEDEL2 surge para dar respuesta a esta creciente necesidad investigadora y así proporcionar una gran cantidad de datos en español L2. CEDEL es parte del proyecto Word Order in Second Language Acquisition Corpora (WOSLAC), cuyo objetivo principal es determinar las propiedades que operan en las interfaces (léxico-sintaxis y sintaxis-discurso) y que restringen el orden de palabras en español L2
últimos años, CEDEL2 surge para dar respuesta a esta creciente necesidad investigadora y así proporcionar una gran cantidad de datos en español L2. CEDEL es parte del proyecto Word Order in Second Language Acquisition Corpora (WOSLAC), cuyo objetivo principal es determinar las propiedades que operan en las interfaces (léxico-sintaxis y sintaxis-discurso) y que restringen el orden de palabras en español L2
word order structures in learner English and learner Spanish (right-periphery of the clause, left-periphery and ‘special’ constructions: passives, subject inversion and so on).
Word order in English and Spanish differs significantly: in English word order is often said to be ‘fixed’, while Spanish allows for what is often referred to as ‘free order’. In languages with free word order, information structure properties and discourse properties in general play a crucial role in the position occupied by constituents in sentences. The two languages differ in the devices they employ to order constituents in the sentence. An in-depth investigation into word order in advanced learners of L2 English and L2 Spanish will thus offer answers to questions regarding the relative difficulty of acquiring lexical-syntactic and syntactic-discursive properties, as well as general issues related to L1 transfer and the occurrence of
constructions which cannot be attributed to the L1 nor to the target language. Some of these issues have been explored in a preliminary analysis on the production of postverbal subjects in learner English (see Lozano & Mendikoetxea, forthcoming).
We analyse VS vs. SV structures in the Italian and Spanish subcorpus of ICLE (Grange et al., 2002) and we compare our results with preliminary results obtained from a similar native English corpus (LOCNESS). Thus, we incorporate some of the fundamental tenets of what is known as Contrastive Interlanguage Approach (see, e.g. Granger ,1996 and Gilquin, 2001), which establishes comparisons between: (a) native and non-native data, and (b) different non-native data. Our main purpose is to see if the
properties that govern the occurrence of postverbal Ss in native English, as currently analysed in the theoretical and descriptive literature, are the same as those operating in the non-native grammars of Spanish and Italian speakers.
We first examine the properties of VS order in English vs. Spanish/Italian
(Section 2). In Section 3, we review previous L2 studies on postverbal Ss. Our hypotheses are presented in Section 4. Section 5 describes the method used to extract and code data from the corpus and their statistical treatment. Results are presented and discussed in Section 6. In Section 7, we compare learner data with data obtained from LOCNESS and Section 8 presents the conclusion.
En este estudio presentamos datos de la adquisición del español L2 por nativos de griego en el contexto de los mecanismos responsables de la resolución de anáfora. Los resultados demuestran que los déficits observados en los aprendices (incluso en niveles de competencia muy avanzada) se deben a un pobre procesamiento del material lingüístico en la interfaz entre el sistema computacional (sintaxis) y otros módulos de la mente (discurso), es decir, en la interfar sintaxis-discurso, y no a una pobre representación de los rasgos lingüísticos que operan en tal interfaz
últimos años, CEDEL2 surge para dar respuesta a esta creciente necesidad investigadora y así proporcionar una gran cantidad de datos en español L2. CEDEL es parte del proyecto Word Order in Second Language Acquisition Corpora (WOSLAC), cuyo objetivo principal es determinar las propiedades que operan en las interfaces (léxico-sintaxis y sintaxis-discurso) y que restringen el orden de palabras en español L2