Cross-linguistic research

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 520.

In work by Kellerman and Sharwood-Smith (1986) the notion of language transfer is renamed cross-linguistic influence, probably coincidentally along with a shift in nomenclature among people with a more direct pedagogical interest in the comparison of languages away from ‘contrastive linguistics' to cross-linguistic research. In the more directly theoretically minded branch of the study of relationships between the learning of various languages by people having various native tongues, the focus has generally speaking shifted towards clarification of the role in L2 acquisition of UG (see and the studies collected in Brown et al. 1996).

Research in this new contrastive linguistics is typically carried out using large machine-readable corpora of texts in two or more languages. The texts may either be sets of pairs of original and translation, or sets of texts originally written in the languages but of the same genre. Corpora whose uses have been extensively described include the English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus held at the universities of Oslo and Bergen, Norway, the English–Swedish Parallel Corpus held at Lund University, Sweden, and the Danish–English–French Corpus in Contract Law held at Aarhus Business School, Denmark (see Aijmer et al. 1996; Johansson and Oksefjell 1998).

Linguists working in this paradigm investigate aspects of language well beyond the traditional areas of phonology, lexis and syntax, such as the pragmatics and the rhetorical structure of texts, including texts such as telephone calls and business negotiations (Aijmer and Altenberg 1996: 11). A particularly helpful corpus for pedagogical purposes is Granger's machine-readable International Corpus of Learner English, situated at Louvan-la-Neuve, Belgium (see Granger 1996). K.M.

Suggestions for further reading Johansson, S. and Oksefjell, S. (eds) (1998)

Corpora and Cross-Linguistic Research: Theory, Method, and Case Studies, Am-sterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.

Richards, J.C. (ed.) (1974) Error Analysis: Perspectives on Second Language Acquisi-tion, Harlow, Essex: Longman.

Robinett, B.W. and Schachter, J. (eds) (1983) Second Language Learning: Con-trastive Analysis and Related Aspects, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Selinker, L. (1992) Rediscovering Inter-language, London: Longman.