Corpus research in the field of English language syntax

The purpose of this project was to study the interlanguage (Selinker, 1972) of Polish learners of English through an investigation of learner writing at selected educational stages. Here, interlanguage is to be understood as an approximative grammatical system that emerges in the mind of a non-native speaker of a language as s/he attempts to emulate the native patterns of the  target language. (Selinker, 1972).

The project took advantage of the methodology of corpus linguistics (Hawkins and Buttery, 2010; Myles, 2008; Covington et al., 2006; Granger and Rayson, 1998; Jarvis and Crossley, 2012; Rosenberg and Abbeduto, 1987; Ai and Lu, 2010, 2013; Lu, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014; McCarthy, 2007). Several of the tools and methods referred to herein have never been used in the Polish context. While the current study is limited to English, it is intended to usher in a series of successive inquiries into the approximative systems of other major languages, such as French, German, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Italian in the Polish educational settings. English was chosen to forerunner inquiry due to its status as a global lingua franca.

The specific research objectives of the project were as follows:

1) To identify the specific grammatical features of the Polish variety of learner English (Polish-English interlanguage – Selinker, 1972; Seidlhofer, 2002) and formalize them via linguistic generalizations.

2) To provide an approximative model of the development of the Polish-English interlanguage throughout successive educational stages (Granger and Rayson, 1998).

2) To establish the extent to which the transfer (Selinker, 1972; Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996) of specific grammatical elements from Polish to English contributes to error production in English written output at various educational and developmental stages.

2) To determine the extent to which the morpho-syntactic accuracy of the written L2 output determines communicative success (as assessed by a trained analyst) and determine error gravity (James, 1977; Hughes, 1982; Magnan, 1982) thresholds pertinent to the Polish context.

3) To determine the extent to which native speaker norms influence the developement of interlanguage norms (Seidlhofer, 2002).