Õppijakeele korpusanalüüsi täiendavatest meetoditest [On some methods of contributing to the corpus-based analysis of the learner language]

Abstract

Most of corpus-based studies of learner language have been completed in the framework of error analysis and have focused mainly on the learners’ products, while learners’ production processes have been less researched. This article deals with some problems and limitations of corpus-based error analysis of learner language. The problems of classification and interpretation as well as the psycholinguistic reality of errors are discussed on the bases of word order errors of Russian learners of Estonian. Some complementary possibilities enabling the researcher to investigate learners’ production process are proposed: introspective methods such as psycholinguistic perceptual tests, thinking aloud-method, retrospective interviews and language technology software such as ScriptLog-program.

The article also presents some results of a preliminary study on psycholinguistic reality of some word order patterns of Estonian from the point of view of Russian learners of Estonian as well as from that of native Estonian speakers. The following word order patterns are discussed: 1) adverbialsubject-predicate-object, 2) adverbial-predicate-subject-object, 3) subject-object-adverbial-object, 4) object-predicate-subjectadverbial. The study concludes that the main differences in perception of the Estonian native speakers and the Russian learners of Estonian concerned V2-rule: the pattern adverbialpredicate-subject-object was perceived as natural by most of  Estonian native speakers and the pattern adverbial-subjectpredicate-object was mostly perceived as unnatural. For most of the Russian learners the pattern adverbial-subject-predicate object was quite natural or nearly natural. The pattern adverbial-predicate-subject-object was perceived as quite natural or nearly natural by a half of the Russian learners of Estonian.

Keywords

corpus-based error analysis, psycholinguistic reality of errors, word order patterns of Estonian, Estonian native speaker, Russian learner of Estonian, introspective methods