In this article, we describe the research and societal needs as well as ongoing efforts to shape ... more In this article, we describe the research and societal needs as well as ongoing efforts to shape Swedish as a Second Language (L2) infrastructure. Our aim is to develop an electronic research infra ...
The overall aim of the thesis is to investigate and describe the use and mastery of different typ... more The overall aim of the thesis is to investigate and describe the use and mastery of different types of phraseological units and conventionalized expressions in the language of adolescents in multilingual environments. The thesis comprises three studies focusing on different aspects of phraseology in relation to first and second language acquisition, development and use. The studies have been carried out mainly from a cognitive perspective. The first study focuses on deviation from standard Swedish in adolescents’ use of phraseological units. Data from the SUF-project (Language and language use among adolescents in multilingual urban settings) have been analyzed in relation to standard Swedish reference data and compared to a constructed variety, rendered in a novel placed in a Swedish multiethnic setting. In the novel deviations from standard Swedish were found to be mostly lexico-grammatical, whereas the authentic data appears to be more complex and deviate both on a lexico-grammat...
Recent years have seen an increasing interest in applying Construction Grammar to additional lang... more Recent years have seen an increasing interest in applying Construction Grammar to additional language (AL) acquisition as well as in constructionist approaches to language contact and multilingualism, in particular Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG; Höder 2018). This paper combines both perspectives by proposing a usage-based constructionist model of AL acquisition as emerging multilingualism. In line with earlier work on DCxG, we assume that multilingual speakers store and process all of their languages in terms of constructions that are organized into one common constructicon. From that perspective, AL learning amounts to an extension and reorganization of the constructicon, resulting not only in the gradual entrenchment of new constructions that represent (a learner variety of) the AL, but also in modifications of previously acquired constructions and the links between them. The model is illustrated by examples from different kinds of AL acquisition scenarios and also discussed in relation to current key concepts within non-constructionist research in the field of AL acquisition.
Set in MS Word, fonts Gentium Book Basic and Linux Libertine by Kristin Hagen. Cover design by Ak... more Set in MS Word, fonts Gentium Book Basic and Linux Libertine by Kristin Hagen. Cover design by Akademika forlag & Atle Grønn. [2] fjeld, hagen, henriksen, johansson, olsen & prentice OSLa volume 9(3), 2017 project groups. Research in Norway has focused on the development of a corpus and lexical resources. A similar focus has guided the research in Sweden, as well as several ongoing research projects in pedagogical and educational topics relevant to academic language use. In Denmark, no academic corpus was available at the onset of the LUNAS project, and the main research focus in the field of academic language had previously been on education in academic English as a second language. These different perspectives are reflected in this volume of collected papers, which, as a result, consists of three different parts: one with a focus on the pedagogical challenges and educational perspectives, one with a focus on the linguistic perspectives and one more generally related to describing academic language with varying approaches. [2] this volume This volume gives a sample of ongoing research in the field of language use in Nordic academic settings. The selection of papers is based on contributions to the conference at the University of Copenhagen in May 2016. The review processes were conducted by inviting a selection of conference participants to submit a contribution to this volume. Each paper was reviewed by two expert researchers in the field. Papers with minor or moderate revision suggestions were accepted for publication. The reviewers listed in alphabetic order are:
This study constitutes a conceptual replication of Forsberg Lundell et al. (2018), who investigat... more This study constitutes a conceptual replication of Forsberg Lundell et al. (2018), who investigated whether productive collocation knowledge – a linguistic feature known to be indicative of high-level L2 proficiency – developed between the B2 and C1 levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages scale in second-language (L2) French. The results showed significant development. The present study set out to replicate these findings in L2 Swedish, in order to investigate whether the reported development would stand cross-linguistic validation. To this end, a test of productive collocation knowledge in L2 Swedish was developed based on 22 separate computerized newspaper corpora of Swedish, searchable via the corpus tool Korp at SprakbankenText (Swedish Language Bank). The method of the item selection was identical to that of the Forsberg Lundell et al., but the replication could only be conceptual since the reference corpora are different, from different languages. Th...
We present an experiment designed for extracting construction candidates for a Swedish constructi... more We present an experiment designed for extracting construction candidates for a Swedish constructicon from text corpora. We have explored the use of hybrid n-grams with the practical goal to discover previously undescribed partially schematic constructions. The experiment was successful, in that quite a few new constructions were discovered. The precision is low, but as a push-button tool for construction discovery, it has proven a valuable tool for the work on a Swedish constructicon.
co-authors for the article by Stemle et al. (2019) and are re-used with the permission of the LCR... more co-authors for the article by Stemle et al. (2019) and are re-used with the permission of the LCR volume editors Article 42, “personal data means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person...” (Commission, 2016, art.4). Consider Figure 1, where adding up information from the two sources – a learner text and sociodemographic metadata – can give away a learner. Even though the name as such is not revealed to the data users, indirect clues can be used to identify a person. SOCIO-DEMOGRAPHIC METADATA • L1: Luxembourgian, Chinese • Year of birth: 1986
The paper describes the ongoing development of compiling and introducing a Swedish academic word ... more The paper describes the ongoing development of compiling and introducing a Swedish academic word list (SAWL), inter alia intended to be used as a lexical resource in CALL-applications in relation to higher academic studies. When it comes to language acquisition, resources like these play an important part in instructed language learning. So far, no such resource exists for Swedish. The format of SAWL has been elaborated in collaboration with the Language Support Service at the University of Gothenburg. SAWL is compiled with methods from corpus linguistics inspired by research on English academic words (Coxhead 2002). Our work includes collection and syntactic annotation of learner corpora of Swedish academic texts from a wide range of university subjects within the Faculty of Arts. The corpora are freely accessible through Sprakbanken. SAWL are designed with university students and language learners with Swedish or other linguistic backgrounds in mind. The word list and the corpora ...
This paper reports on the status of learner corpus anonymization for the ongoing research infrast... more This paper reports on the status of learner corpus anonymization for the ongoing research infrastructure project SweLL. The main project aim is to deliver and make available for research a well-ann ...
The aim of the current paper is to reinterpret some results of two previous studies on the master... more The aim of the current paper is to reinterpret some results of two previous studies on the mastery of figurative expressions from the perspective of usage-based linguistics. The reanalysis aims to shed more light on the learning and use of figurative language by multilingual students by exploring the complex interplay of linguistic creativity, expressivity, and conventionality in figurative expressions. The reinterpretation shows that many of the examples that were previously categorized as novel figurative expressions used in students’ writing, can be analyzed as instances of regular patterns, i.e. constructions, with certain lexical idiosyncrasies. Modifications of conventionalized figurative expressions are discussed and reinterpreted in terms of strength of entrenchment of links between form and meaning within certain constructions or links between constructions and conventionalized pragmatic information in the multilinguals’ mental construction. Implications for the treatment o...
The Northern European Journal of Language Technology, 2019
The article presents a new language learner corpus for Swedish, SweLL, and the methodology from c... more The article presents a new language learner corpus for Swedish, SweLL, and the methodology from collection and pesudonymisation to protect personal information of learners to annotation adapted to second language learning. The main aim is to deliver a well-annotated corpus of essays written by second language learners of Swedish and make it available for research through a browsable environment. To that end, a new annotation tool and a new project management tool have been implemented, – both with the main purpose to ensure reliability and quality of the final corpus. In the article we discuss reasoning behind metadata selection, principles of gold corpus compilation and argue for separation of normalization from correction annotation.
The Swedish Constructicon (SweCcn) is developed as a multi-purpose database, including an aim to ... more The Swedish Constructicon (SweCcn) is developed as a multi-purpose database, including an aim to cover constructions that are potentially problematic for second language learners of Swedish. In this paper, we address the resource’s relevance and applicability to (second) language pedagogy and the development of sample exercises and other support material made available through the SweCcn website. We also discuss the conditions for integrating SweCcn with other linguistic resources, in interlingual as well as Swedish contexts.
This article investigates the entrenchment of semi-schematic time constructions in both L1-and L2... more This article investigates the entrenchment of semi-schematic time constructions in both L1-and L2-speakers of Swedish. High frequency expressions are often considered highly entrenched in the mind of speakers, which means that those expressions are recognized, accessed and retrieved faster than low frequency expressions. We present a phrasal decision experiment carried out on L1 and L2 speakers of Swedish, in which the task was to decide as quickly as possible if the stimulus expression is a legitimate way to express time in Swedish. The results show that frequent instances of a semi-schematic time construction are processed faster as well as with a higher decision accuracy than nonce expressions in both L1 and L2 groups. For the L1 group, rare instances are processed with intermediate speed and with relatively high accuracy. For the group of L2 participants, rare instances have low decision accuracy and longer response times than nonce expressions. On the basis of these data, the s...
Olofsson, Joel, [email protected], Ph.D., Division of Educational Science and Languages, Univer... more Olofsson, Joel, [email protected], Ph.D., Division of Educational Science and Languages, University West; Prentice, Julia, [email protected], Ph.D., Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg: "Three enormous beers ago. The entrenchment of semi-schematic constructions in L2 Swedish". Språk och stil NF 30, 2020, pp. 91-116. This article investigates the entrenchment of semi-schematic time constructions in both L1-and L2-speakers of Swedish. High frequency expressions are often considered highly entrenched in the mind of speakers, which means that those expressions are recognized, accessed and retrieved faster than low frequency expressions. We present a phrasal decision experiment carried out on L1 and L2 speakers of Swedish, in which the task was to decide as quickly as possible if the stimulus expression is a legitimate way to express time in Swedish. The results show that frequent instances of a semi-schematic time construction are processed faster as well as with a higher decision accuracy than nonce expressions in both L1 and L2 groups. For the L1 group, rare instances are processed with intermediate speed and with relatively high accuracy. For the group of L2 participants, rare instances have low decision accuracy and longer response times than nonce expressions. On the basis of these data, the study suggest that a more extended construction is entrenched in the L1 group, compared to the more restricted construction entrenched in the L2 group.
In this article, we describe the research and societal needs as well as ongoing efforts to shape ... more In this article, we describe the research and societal needs as well as ongoing efforts to shape Swedish as a Second Language (L2) infrastructure. Our aim is to develop an electronic research infra ...
The overall aim of the thesis is to investigate and describe the use and mastery of different typ... more The overall aim of the thesis is to investigate and describe the use and mastery of different types of phraseological units and conventionalized expressions in the language of adolescents in multilingual environments. The thesis comprises three studies focusing on different aspects of phraseology in relation to first and second language acquisition, development and use. The studies have been carried out mainly from a cognitive perspective. The first study focuses on deviation from standard Swedish in adolescents’ use of phraseological units. Data from the SUF-project (Language and language use among adolescents in multilingual urban settings) have been analyzed in relation to standard Swedish reference data and compared to a constructed variety, rendered in a novel placed in a Swedish multiethnic setting. In the novel deviations from standard Swedish were found to be mostly lexico-grammatical, whereas the authentic data appears to be more complex and deviate both on a lexico-grammat...
Recent years have seen an increasing interest in applying Construction Grammar to additional lang... more Recent years have seen an increasing interest in applying Construction Grammar to additional language (AL) acquisition as well as in constructionist approaches to language contact and multilingualism, in particular Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG; Höder 2018). This paper combines both perspectives by proposing a usage-based constructionist model of AL acquisition as emerging multilingualism. In line with earlier work on DCxG, we assume that multilingual speakers store and process all of their languages in terms of constructions that are organized into one common constructicon. From that perspective, AL learning amounts to an extension and reorganization of the constructicon, resulting not only in the gradual entrenchment of new constructions that represent (a learner variety of) the AL, but also in modifications of previously acquired constructions and the links between them. The model is illustrated by examples from different kinds of AL acquisition scenarios and also discussed in relation to current key concepts within non-constructionist research in the field of AL acquisition.
Set in MS Word, fonts Gentium Book Basic and Linux Libertine by Kristin Hagen. Cover design by Ak... more Set in MS Word, fonts Gentium Book Basic and Linux Libertine by Kristin Hagen. Cover design by Akademika forlag & Atle Grønn. [2] fjeld, hagen, henriksen, johansson, olsen & prentice OSLa volume 9(3), 2017 project groups. Research in Norway has focused on the development of a corpus and lexical resources. A similar focus has guided the research in Sweden, as well as several ongoing research projects in pedagogical and educational topics relevant to academic language use. In Denmark, no academic corpus was available at the onset of the LUNAS project, and the main research focus in the field of academic language had previously been on education in academic English as a second language. These different perspectives are reflected in this volume of collected papers, which, as a result, consists of three different parts: one with a focus on the pedagogical challenges and educational perspectives, one with a focus on the linguistic perspectives and one more generally related to describing academic language with varying approaches. [2] this volume This volume gives a sample of ongoing research in the field of language use in Nordic academic settings. The selection of papers is based on contributions to the conference at the University of Copenhagen in May 2016. The review processes were conducted by inviting a selection of conference participants to submit a contribution to this volume. Each paper was reviewed by two expert researchers in the field. Papers with minor or moderate revision suggestions were accepted for publication. The reviewers listed in alphabetic order are:
This study constitutes a conceptual replication of Forsberg Lundell et al. (2018), who investigat... more This study constitutes a conceptual replication of Forsberg Lundell et al. (2018), who investigated whether productive collocation knowledge – a linguistic feature known to be indicative of high-level L2 proficiency – developed between the B2 and C1 levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages scale in second-language (L2) French. The results showed significant development. The present study set out to replicate these findings in L2 Swedish, in order to investigate whether the reported development would stand cross-linguistic validation. To this end, a test of productive collocation knowledge in L2 Swedish was developed based on 22 separate computerized newspaper corpora of Swedish, searchable via the corpus tool Korp at SprakbankenText (Swedish Language Bank). The method of the item selection was identical to that of the Forsberg Lundell et al., but the replication could only be conceptual since the reference corpora are different, from different languages. Th...
We present an experiment designed for extracting construction candidates for a Swedish constructi... more We present an experiment designed for extracting construction candidates for a Swedish constructicon from text corpora. We have explored the use of hybrid n-grams with the practical goal to discover previously undescribed partially schematic constructions. The experiment was successful, in that quite a few new constructions were discovered. The precision is low, but as a push-button tool for construction discovery, it has proven a valuable tool for the work on a Swedish constructicon.
co-authors for the article by Stemle et al. (2019) and are re-used with the permission of the LCR... more co-authors for the article by Stemle et al. (2019) and are re-used with the permission of the LCR volume editors Article 42, “personal data means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person...” (Commission, 2016, art.4). Consider Figure 1, where adding up information from the two sources – a learner text and sociodemographic metadata – can give away a learner. Even though the name as such is not revealed to the data users, indirect clues can be used to identify a person. SOCIO-DEMOGRAPHIC METADATA • L1: Luxembourgian, Chinese • Year of birth: 1986
The paper describes the ongoing development of compiling and introducing a Swedish academic word ... more The paper describes the ongoing development of compiling and introducing a Swedish academic word list (SAWL), inter alia intended to be used as a lexical resource in CALL-applications in relation to higher academic studies. When it comes to language acquisition, resources like these play an important part in instructed language learning. So far, no such resource exists for Swedish. The format of SAWL has been elaborated in collaboration with the Language Support Service at the University of Gothenburg. SAWL is compiled with methods from corpus linguistics inspired by research on English academic words (Coxhead 2002). Our work includes collection and syntactic annotation of learner corpora of Swedish academic texts from a wide range of university subjects within the Faculty of Arts. The corpora are freely accessible through Sprakbanken. SAWL are designed with university students and language learners with Swedish or other linguistic backgrounds in mind. The word list and the corpora ...
This paper reports on the status of learner corpus anonymization for the ongoing research infrast... more This paper reports on the status of learner corpus anonymization for the ongoing research infrastructure project SweLL. The main project aim is to deliver and make available for research a well-ann ...
The aim of the current paper is to reinterpret some results of two previous studies on the master... more The aim of the current paper is to reinterpret some results of two previous studies on the mastery of figurative expressions from the perspective of usage-based linguistics. The reanalysis aims to shed more light on the learning and use of figurative language by multilingual students by exploring the complex interplay of linguistic creativity, expressivity, and conventionality in figurative expressions. The reinterpretation shows that many of the examples that were previously categorized as novel figurative expressions used in students’ writing, can be analyzed as instances of regular patterns, i.e. constructions, with certain lexical idiosyncrasies. Modifications of conventionalized figurative expressions are discussed and reinterpreted in terms of strength of entrenchment of links between form and meaning within certain constructions or links between constructions and conventionalized pragmatic information in the multilinguals’ mental construction. Implications for the treatment o...
The Northern European Journal of Language Technology, 2019
The article presents a new language learner corpus for Swedish, SweLL, and the methodology from c... more The article presents a new language learner corpus for Swedish, SweLL, and the methodology from collection and pesudonymisation to protect personal information of learners to annotation adapted to second language learning. The main aim is to deliver a well-annotated corpus of essays written by second language learners of Swedish and make it available for research through a browsable environment. To that end, a new annotation tool and a new project management tool have been implemented, – both with the main purpose to ensure reliability and quality of the final corpus. In the article we discuss reasoning behind metadata selection, principles of gold corpus compilation and argue for separation of normalization from correction annotation.
The Swedish Constructicon (SweCcn) is developed as a multi-purpose database, including an aim to ... more The Swedish Constructicon (SweCcn) is developed as a multi-purpose database, including an aim to cover constructions that are potentially problematic for second language learners of Swedish. In this paper, we address the resource’s relevance and applicability to (second) language pedagogy and the development of sample exercises and other support material made available through the SweCcn website. We also discuss the conditions for integrating SweCcn with other linguistic resources, in interlingual as well as Swedish contexts.
This article investigates the entrenchment of semi-schematic time constructions in both L1-and L2... more This article investigates the entrenchment of semi-schematic time constructions in both L1-and L2-speakers of Swedish. High frequency expressions are often considered highly entrenched in the mind of speakers, which means that those expressions are recognized, accessed and retrieved faster than low frequency expressions. We present a phrasal decision experiment carried out on L1 and L2 speakers of Swedish, in which the task was to decide as quickly as possible if the stimulus expression is a legitimate way to express time in Swedish. The results show that frequent instances of a semi-schematic time construction are processed faster as well as with a higher decision accuracy than nonce expressions in both L1 and L2 groups. For the L1 group, rare instances are processed with intermediate speed and with relatively high accuracy. For the group of L2 participants, rare instances have low decision accuracy and longer response times than nonce expressions. On the basis of these data, the s...
Olofsson, Joel, [email protected], Ph.D., Division of Educational Science and Languages, Univer... more Olofsson, Joel, [email protected], Ph.D., Division of Educational Science and Languages, University West; Prentice, Julia, [email protected], Ph.D., Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg: "Three enormous beers ago. The entrenchment of semi-schematic constructions in L2 Swedish". Språk och stil NF 30, 2020, pp. 91-116. This article investigates the entrenchment of semi-schematic time constructions in both L1-and L2-speakers of Swedish. High frequency expressions are often considered highly entrenched in the mind of speakers, which means that those expressions are recognized, accessed and retrieved faster than low frequency expressions. We present a phrasal decision experiment carried out on L1 and L2 speakers of Swedish, in which the task was to decide as quickly as possible if the stimulus expression is a legitimate way to express time in Swedish. The results show that frequent instances of a semi-schematic time construction are processed faster as well as with a higher decision accuracy than nonce expressions in both L1 and L2 groups. For the L1 group, rare instances are processed with intermediate speed and with relatively high accuracy. For the group of L2 participants, rare instances have low decision accuracy and longer response times than nonce expressions. On the basis of these data, the study suggest that a more extended construction is entrenched in the L1 group, compared to the more restricted construction entrenched in the L2 group.
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Papers by Julia Prentice