Ute Römer-Barron
Georgia State University, Applied Linguistics & ESL, Faculty Member
- Languages and Linguistics, Pragmatics, Corpus Linguistics, Academic Writing, English for Academic Purposes, Text Linguistics, and 11 moreCorpus Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics & Language Pedagogy, Phraseology, Documentary Linguistics, Corpus Consultation (Applied Linguistics), Corpus Creation, Academic discourse, Learner corpora, Genre research, Academic discourse analysis, and Pedagogical Grammaredit
- Professor of Applied Linguisticsedit
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If a federal official is deliberately violating the Constitution, is it possible that no federal court has the power to halt that conduct? Federal judges have been answering “yes” for more than a century – dismissing certain kinds of... more
If a federal official is deliberately violating the Constitution, is it possible that no federal court has the power to halt that conduct? Federal judges have been answering “yes” for more than a century – dismissing certain kinds of lawsuits alleging unconstitutional conduct by ruling that the lawsuits were not “cases” as meant in the phrase “The judicial Power shall extend to all cases” in Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution. In 1911 the United States Supreme Court declared: “[T]he exercise of the judicial power is limited to ‘cases’ and ‘controversies.’ … By cases and controversies are intended the claims of litigants. … The term implies the existence of present or possible adverse parties, whose contentions are submitted to the court for adjudication.” The Supreme Court has subsequently further specified the meaning of “case” within the meaning of Article III to include the following “essential core”: a plaintiff who has suffered a concrete and particularized injury that...
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This paper introduces the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) as a new resource that will enable researchers and teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) to investigate the written discourse of highly advanced... more
This paper introduces the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) as a new resource that will enable researchers and teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) to investigate the written discourse of highly advanced student writers whose written assignments have been awarded the grade ‘A’. The usefulness of two aspects of the design of the corpus — variation across discipline and across student level — is illustrated by two case studies, one on attribution and one on recurrent phraseological patterns. The first case study investigates how references to the work of others are realized and to what extent disciplinary variation exists in unpublished academic writing by students. The second study examines the use of phraseological items (n-grams and phrase-frames) by students at four different levels of undergraduate and graduate study. The paper closes with a discussion of the results of both case studies and describes future avenues for MICUSP-based research.
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This plenary speech provides an overview of applications of corpus research in several core areas of applied linguistics, including second language acquisition and language assessment. It does this by showcasing a number of recent studies... more
This plenary speech provides an overview of applications of corpus research in several core areas of applied linguistics, including second language acquisition and language assessment. It does this by showcasing a number of recent studies carried out by or with involvement of the author. These studies all focus on phraseological aspects of language and demonstrate the importance of studying its patterned nature. The studies also illustrate how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can allow us as applied linguists to contribute to solving problems in other disciplines (such as legal scholarship or music theory) and hope to thereby encourage more interdisciplinary research collaborations between corpus linguists and scholars from other fields.
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Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139810/1/LCR_offprint_pp357-378.pd
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Using data from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the British National Corpus (BNC), this article examines what Turkish learners of English know about a set of frequent verb-argument constructions (VACs, such as ‘V... more
Using data from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and the British National Corpus (BNC), this article examines what Turkish learners of English know about a set of frequent verb-argument constructions (VACs, such as ‘V with n’ as illustrated by ‘I like to go with the flow’) and in what ways their VAC knowledge is influenced by native English usage and by transfer from their first language (L1), Turkish. An ICLE Turkish analysis gave us access to dominant verb-VAC associations in Turkish learners ́ English, and provided insights into the productivity and predictability of selected constructions. Comparisons with the BNC and other ICLE subsets (ICLE German and ICLE Spanish) allowed us to determine how strong the usage effect is on Turkish learners’ verb-VAC associations and whether Turkish learners differ in this respect from learners of other typologically different L1s. Potential effects of L1 transfer were explored with the help of a large reference corpus of Turki...
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This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing practice. It discusses how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can illuminate central aspects of speech and help in conceptualizing the... more
This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing practice. It discusses how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can illuminate central aspects of speech and help in conceptualizing the notion of lexicogrammar in second language speaking assessment. The description of speech and some of its core features is based on the 1.8-million-word Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and on the 10-million-word spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC). Analyses of word frequency and keyword lists are followed by an automatic extraction of different types of phraseological items that are particularly common in speech and serve important communicative functions. These corpus explorations provide evidence for the strong interconnectedness of lexical items and grammatical structures in natural language. Based on the assumption that the existence of lexicogrammatical patterns is of relevance for constructs of speaking tests,...
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Over the past few decades, corpora have not only revolutionized linguistic research but have also had an impact on second language learning and teaching. In the field of applied linguistics, more and more researchers and practitioners... more
Over the past few decades, corpora have not only revolutionized linguistic research but have also had an impact on second language learning and teaching. In the field of applied linguistics, more and more researchers and practitioners treasure what corpus linguistics has to offer to language pedagogy. Still, corpora and corpus tools have yet to be widely implemented in pedagogical contexts. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of pedagogical corpus applications and to review recent publications in the area of corpus linguistics and language teaching. It covers indirect corpus applications, such as in syllabus or materials design, as well as direct applications of corpora in the second language classroom. The article aims to illustrate how both general and specialized language corpora can be used in these applications and discusses directions for future research in applied corpus linguistics.
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We used free association tasks to investigate second language (L2) verb-argument constructions (VACs) and the ways in which their access is sensitive to statistical patterns of usage (verb type-token frequency distribution, VAC-verb... more
We used free association tasks to investigate second language (L2) verb-argument constructions (VACs) and the ways in which their access is sensitive to statistical patterns of usage (verb type-token frequency distribution, VAC-verb contingency, verb-VAC semantic prototypicality). 131 German, 131 Spanish, and 131 Czech advanced L2 learners of English generated the first word that came to mind to fill the V slot in 40 sparse VAC frames such as ‘he __ across the …’, ‘it __ of the …’, etc. For each VAC, we compared these results with corpus analyses of verb selection preferences in 100 million words of usage and with the semantic network structure of the verbs in these VACs. For all language groups, multiple regression analyses predicting the frequencies of verb types generated for each VAC show independent contributions of (i) verb frequency in the VAC, (ii) VAC-verb contingency, and (iii) verb prototypicality in terms of centrality within the VAC semantic network. L2 VAC processing i...
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Based on a large set of data from one of the biggest available corpora of spoken British English (the 10-million word spoken component of the BNC), this article explores central lexical-grammatical aspects of progressive forms with future... more
Based on a large set of data from one of the biggest available corpora of spoken British English (the 10-million word spoken component of the BNC), this article explores central lexical-grammatical aspects of progressive forms with future time reference. Among the phenomena investigated are verb preferences, adverbial co-selection, subject types, and negation. It is demonstrated that future time progressives in spoken British English are patterned to a considerable extent (for example that it is individual verbs, rather than semantic groups of verbs, that preferably occur in such constructions) and that actual language use often runs counter to claims that can be found in traditional grammatical descriptions of the construction. A number of general and often neglected issues in the analysis of lexical-grammatical patterns are also addressed, in particular the notion of pattern frequency.
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Starting from the observation that meaning does not primarily reside in individual words but in the phrase, this paper focuses on the examination of recurring phrases in language. It introduces a new analytical model that leads corpus... more
Starting from the observation that meaning does not primarily reside in individual words but in the phrase, this paper focuses on the examination of recurring phrases in language. It introduces a new analytical model that leads corpus researchers to a profile of the central phraseological items in a selected text or text collection. In this paper, the model is applied to a 3.5-million word corpus of online academic book reviews that represents part of the specialized discourse of the global community of linguists. This demonstrates how the model facilitates the study of the occurrence and distribution of the central phraseological items in linguistic book reviews, and how it helps to determine the extent of the phraseological tendency of language.
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The purpose of this study was to uncover sets of co-occurring, lexico-grammatical features to help to characterise successful student writing. The writing was captured by the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP, 2009)... more
The purpose of this study was to uncover sets of co-occurring, lexico-grammatical features to help to characterise successful student writing. The writing was captured by the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP, 2009) and was taken from sixteen disciplines. MICUSP is a corpus of A-graded, upper-level student papers of different disciplines and paper types ( O'Donnell and Römer, 2012 ; and Römer and O'Donnell, 2011 ). Following Biber (1988) , we used a multi-dimensional analysis to identify dimensions of frequently co-occurring features that best account for cross-disciplinary variation in MICUSP. The four functional dimensions of MICUSP appear to distinguish between: (1) Involved, Academic Narrative versus Descriptive, Informational Discourse; (2) Expression of Opinions and Mental Processes; (3) Situation-Dependent, Non-Procedural Evaluation versus Procedural Discourse; and (4) Production of Possibility Statement and Argumentation. Along with a description ...
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In this paper, we provide a detailed account of the steps that were central to designing and compiling the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). MICUSP is a new collection of 829 papers (around 2.6 million words) written... more
In this paper, we provide a detailed account of the steps that were central to designing and compiling the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). MICUSP is a new collection of 829 papers (around 2.6 million words) written by University of Michigan students in their final undergraduate year or in their first three years of graduate education. The papers come from sixteen disciplines, ranging from Humanities and Arts to Physical Sciences, and represent a range of different text types. In this paper, we offer an overview of the design of MICUSP, the online submission process used to collect papers, and the text-type classification of the papers.
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This paper continues the detailed account of the central steps involved in compiling and distributing the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). In this paper, we discuss the annotation process used to encode MICUSP files... more
This paper continues the detailed account of the central steps involved in compiling and distributing the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). In this paper, we discuss the annotation process used to encode MICUSP files in TEI-compliant XML, and the development of MICUSP Simple, the online application through which the corpus is now freely available online. We also describe how MICUSP Simple can be used to carry out simple word/phrase searches and to browse papers within different categories.
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Información del artículo Exploring the variation and distribution of academic phrase-frames in MICUSP.
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This paper draws on data from learner and native-speaker corpora as well as psycholinguistic data to gain insights into second language speaker knowledge of English verb-argument constructions (VACs). For each of 34 VACs, L1 German and L1... more
This paper draws on data from learner and native-speaker corpora as well as psycholinguistic data to gain insights into second language speaker knowledge of English verb-argument constructions (VACs). For each of 34 VACs, L1 German and L1 Spanish advanced English learners’ and English native speakers’ dominant verb–VAC associations are examined based on data retrieved from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (LINDSEI), their respective Native Speaker (NS) reference corpora, and data collected in verbal fluency tasks in which participants complete VAC frames, such as, ‘she _______ with the…’ with verbs that come to mind. We compare findings from the different data sets and consider the strengths and limitations of each in relation to questions in usage-based second language acquisition and Construction Grammar.
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This volume showcases studies that recognize and provide evidence for the inseparability of lexis and grammar. The contributors explore in what ways these two areas, often treated separately in linguistic theory and description, form an... more
This volume showcases studies that recognize and provide evidence for the inseparability of lexis and grammar. The contributors explore in what ways these two areas, often treated separately in linguistic theory and description, form an organic whole. The papers in Section I (Setting the Scene) introduce some of the key methodological approaches and theoretical positions at the lexis-grammar interface, while Section II (Considering the Particulars) contains papers that report on case studies and show concrete applications of the central ...
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This article reports on a study that explored cross-disciplinary variation in the use of metadiscourse markers in advanced-level student writing, put forward as a realistic target for novice writers. Starting from the stance and... more
This article reports on a study that explored cross-disciplinary variation in the use of metadiscourse markers in advanced-level student writing, put forward as a realistic target for novice writers. Starting from the stance and engagement categories included in Hyland’s model, we first conducted a comprehensive quantitative analysis of interactional metadiscourse across disciplines. For this analysis, we used an automated processing tool that generates quantity scores for each metadiscourse category. We then carried out a detailed qualitative analysis of selected items that contributed significantly to these category scores. The data for our analyses come from a corpus of 829 student papers from 16 different disciplines. The results showed notable differences in students’ use of metadiscourse features across academic divisions and disciplines. We suggest that this offers evidence of advanced students’ ability to express interactional strategies that are in line with disciplinary ex...
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Despite the progress that has recently been made in the field of corpus linguistics and language teaching, it is not clear what impact corpora have actually had so far on English language teaching practice. Corpus researchers often claim... more
Despite the progress that has recently been made in the field of corpus linguistics and language teaching, it is not clear what impact corpora have actually had so far on English language teaching practice. Corpus researchers often claim that corpus linguistics can make a difference for language teaching and that it has an immense potential to improve pedagogy, but perhaps do not focus enough on the interface of research and practice. They do not make sufficient efforts to reach practitioners, especially teachers, with the ‘corpus mission’, do not know enough about the needs of teachers, and do not show them where corpora can help them solve everyday problems. The present chapter aims to address these issues. It centres on a teachers’ needs analysis carried out to capture important aspects about the situation of teachers, their problems and wishes they might have. A questionnaire was devised that covered topics such as the quality of existing teaching materials, authenticity in language teaching, and the teachers’ language competence and exam marking. This chapter will present selected results from the teachers’ survey and discuss where corpus linguistics (or corpus linguists, rather) could, and should perhaps, offer help to teachers, hence showing them that corpus research can have an impact on pedagogical practice and that corpora can actually make a difference.
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Based on datasets of L1 Italian and Spanish learner language culled from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus Sample, this paper investigates how verb-argument constructions (VACs) develop in the spoken English of L2 learners across proficiency... more
Based on datasets of L1 Italian and Spanish learner language culled from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus Sample, this paper investigates how verb-argument constructions (VACs) develop in the spoken English of L2 learners across proficiency levels. In addition to proficiency and L1 effects, we focus on the potential influence of native English usage on learner VAC production. Insights into learners’ productive knowledge of five target VACs and the verbs used in those VACs are gained through (1) comparisons of normalized entropy scores for verbs in VACs; (2) correlation analyses comparing for each VAC the verbs produced by groups of learners and by native English speakers; and (3) regression analyses comparing learner verb-VAC associations against indices of VAC usage, including verb-VAC frequency, VAC-verb association strength and contingency. Results indicate that, across L1 backgrounds, more proficient learners are more productive in their VAC use and closer to patterns in L1 English ...
This article reports initial findings from a study that uses written data from second language (L2) learners of English at different proficiency levels (CEFR A1 to C1) in a large-scale investigation of verb-argument construction (VAC)... more
This article reports initial findings from a study that uses written data from second language (L2) learners of English at different proficiency levels (CEFR A1 to C1) in a large-scale investigation of verb-argument construction (VAC) emergence. The findings provide insights into first VACs in L2 learner production, changes in the learners’ VAC repertoire from low to high proficiency levels, and changes in learners’ dominant verb-VAC associations from low to high proficiency levels. The article also addresses the question what role formulaic sequences play in the L2 acquisition of VACs. Data analyses indicate that, from lowest to highest proficiency levels, the VAC repertoire of L2 English learners shows an increase in VAC types, growth in VAC productivity and complexity, and a development from predominantly fixed sequences to more flexible and productive ones. The findings help to expand our understanding of the processes that underlie construction acquisition in an L2 context.
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Based on writing produced by second language learners at different proficiency levels (CEFR A1 to C1), we adopted a usage-based approach (Ellis, Römer, & O’Donnell, 2016; Tyler & Ortega, 2018) to investigate how German and Spanish learner... more
Based on writing produced by second language learners at different proficiency levels (CEFR A1 to C1), we adopted a usage-based approach (Ellis, Römer, & O’Donnell, 2016; Tyler & Ortega, 2018) to investigate how German and Spanish learner knowledge of 19 English verb-argument constructions (VACs; e.g., “V with n,” illustrated by he always agrees with her) develops. We extracted VACs from subsets of the Education First-Cambridge Open Language Database, altogether comprising more than 68,000 texts and 6 million words. For each VAC, L1 learner group, and proficiency level, we determined type and token frequencies, as well as the most dominant verb-VAC associations. To study effects of proficiency and L1 on VAC production, we carried out correlation analyses to compare verb-VAC associations of learners at different levels and different L1 backgrounds. We also correlated each learner dataset with comparable data from a large reference corpus of native English usage. Results indicate that...
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Abstract The past few years have seen an increasing interest in studies based on new kinds of specialised corpora that capture an ever-growing range of text types. Now that more and larger collections of such specialised texts (or of... more
Abstract The past few years have seen an increasing interest in studies based on new kinds of specialised corpora that capture an ever-growing range of text types. Now that more and larger collections of such specialised texts (or of “restricted languages” in Firthian terms) are becoming available, corpus researchers seem to switch from describing the English language as a whole to the description of a number of different language varieties and community discourses.
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Abstract: The paper gives a preliminary account of a more extensive study (Römer, 2005) of the use of progressive forms (eg're looking, in" let's say we're looking at... more
Abstract: The paper gives a preliminary account of a more extensive study (Römer, 2005) of the use of progressive forms (eg're looking, in" let's say we're looking at carbonates") in huge collections of spoken British English and in a small corpus of'spoken-type'texts from German EFL textbooks. The starting point for this data-driven approach is an examination of 100 high-frequency present participle forms. As a concrete example, the results of a detailed analysis of one of these participles, the lexical item looking, its different functions and semantic and ...
Patterns and Meanings: Using Corpora for English Language Research and Teaching, Partington's slim but thorough monograph, is a welcome contribution to the field of corpus linguistics. It illustrates how using computer... more
Patterns and Meanings: Using Corpora for English Language Research and Teaching, Partington's slim but thorough monograph, is a welcome contribution to the field of corpus linguistics. It illustrates how using computer corpora in the study of language phenomena ...
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Formulaic sequences are recognised as having important roles in language acquisition, processing, fluency, idiomaticity, and instruction. But there is little agreement over their definition and measurement, or on methods of corpus... more
Formulaic sequences are recognised as having important roles in language acquisition, processing, fluency, idiomaticity, and instruction. But there is little agreement over their definition and measurement, or on methods of corpus comparison. We argue that replicable research must be grounded upon operational definitions in statistical terms. We adopt an experimental design and apply four different corpus-analytic measures, variously based upon n-gram frequency (Frequency-grams), association (MI-grams), phrase-frames (P-frames), and native norm (items in the Academic Formulas List – AFL-grams), to samples of first and second language writing in order to examine and compare knowledge of formulas in first and second language acquisition as a function of proficiency and language background. We find that these different operationalizations produce different patterns of effect of expertise and L1/L2 status. We consider the implications for corpus design and methods of analysis.
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This paper combines data from learner corpora and psycholinguistic experiments in an attempt to find out what advanced learners of English (first language backgrounds German and Spanish) know about a range of common verbargument... more
This paper combines data from learner corpora and psycholinguistic experiments in an attempt to find out what advanced learners of English (first language backgrounds German and Spanish) know about a range of common verbargument constructions (VACs), such as the ‘V about n’ construction (e.g. she thinks about chocolate a lot). Learners’ dominant verb-VAC associations are examined based on evidence retrieved from the German and Spanish subcomponents of ICLE and LINDSEI and collected in lexical production tasks in which participants complete VAC frames (e.g. ‘he ___ about the...’) with verbs that may fill the blank (e.g. talked, thought, wondered). The paper compares findings from the different data sets and highlights the value of linking corpus and experimental evidence in studying linguistic phenomena
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This book is a translated and extended revision of an issue of the French journal Terminogramme published in 2001. In Ch. 1,'Introduction'(1–10), editors Jacques Maurais and Michael A. Morris provide an overview... more
This book is a translated and extended revision of an issue of the French journal Terminogramme published in 2001. In Ch. 1,'Introduction'(1–10), editors Jacques Maurais and Michael A. Morris provide an overview of the book, noting that the contributions are organized into three parts: global communication challenges, major areas, and languages of wider communication. Five chapters constitute Part 1 of the book. In Ch. 2,'Towards a new linguistic world order'(13–36), JACQUES MAURAIS discusses recent historical events, ...
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Corpus approaches to grammaticalization in English, edited by Hans Lindquist and Christian Mair, directly responds to this observation. The nine papers in this volume provide links between corpus methodology (including frequency and... more
Corpus approaches to grammaticalization in English, edited by Hans Lindquist and Christian Mair, directly responds to this observation. The nine papers in this volume provide links between corpus methodology (including frequency and contextual analyses) and one key phenomenon in current linguistic theory that deals with processes toward grammatical restriction, such as the change from word to clitic, semantic bleaching, or phonological reduction. The individual authors deal with a number of interfaces between G and different ...
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Up to now the text and discourse dimensions have been comparatively neglected in corpus linguistic research. The present collection of twelve papers can be seen as a response to this research desideratum. In their introduction, Karin... more
Up to now the text and discourse dimensions have been comparatively neglected in corpus linguistic research. The present collection of twelve papers can be seen as a response to this research desideratum. In their introduction, Karin Aijmer and Anna-Brita Stenström review traditional approaches to, as well as recent trends in, the study of text and discourse and define the scope of the volume. They cover the interrelated fields of genre analysis, academic discourse, cohesion, deixis, metaphor, evaluation, and contrastive analysis.
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Studies in Corpus Linguistics Studies in Corpus Linguistics aims to provide insights into the way a corpus can be used, the type of findings that can be obtained, the possible applications of these findings as well as the theoretical... more
Studies in Corpus Linguistics Studies in Corpus Linguistics aims to provide insights into the way a corpus can be used, the type of findings that can be obtained, the possible applications of these findings as well as the theoretical changes that corpus work can bring into linguistics and ...
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This paper addresses the question of what governs the optional attendance of the determiner this by a noun phrase in academic student writing. Previous research on this has largely focused on the noun phrases accompanying this, while the... more
This paper addresses the question of what governs the optional attendance of the determiner this by a noun phrase in academic student writing. Previous research on this has largely focused on the noun phrases accompanying this, while the question of what determines writers' choice between attended and unattended this in the first place has received only little attention. In the present study, we present the results of a more comprehensive analysis, including quantitative methods (logistic regression analysis, Distinctive Collexeme Analysis, textual distribution measures) and qualitative methods (cluster extraction), of more than 5,800 hits of sentence-initial this obtained from the Michigan Corpus of Upper Level Student Papers (MICUSP). Overall, the results point to a strong influence of the verb accompanying (un)attended this, which is moderated to some extent by author-related variables like academic discipline, academic proficiency level, native speaker status, and gender. A ...