The use of English negation by Spanish students of English: a learner corpus-based study

Araceli Garca Fuentes

doi:10.4995/rlyla.2008.689

Authors

Araceli Garca Fuentes Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4995/rlyla.2008.689

Keywords:

Corpus linguistics (CL), learner corpus, foreign language learning (FLL), second language acquisition (SLA), English as a foreign language (EFL)

Abstract

This paper is based on a research project by the same author; in which the acquisition of the English negation system is investigated. This is a preliminary account and it is corpus-based. Two learner corpora were used: the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) Spanish subcorpus and the Santiago University Learner of English Corpus (SULEC). The former is a sample corpus -it is finished- and it contains written argumentative essays of Spanish speakers. The latter contains both spoken and written data -oral interviews and argumentative texts- and it is a monitor corpus; new data are continuously being added. The Spanish subcorpus of ICLE contains over 125.000 words; whereas SULEC contained over 350.000 words at the moment of the research. A native English corpus was also used in order to contrast the learner and the native use of English negation.

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