Avainrakenneanalyysi: Tapa tutkia oppijankielen lauserakennetta korpusvetoisesti

Kirjoittajat

• Ilmari Ivaska Turun yliopisto
• Kirsti Siitonen Turun yliopisto

Avainsanat:

syntax, corpus linguistics, Finnish as a second language, keystructure analysis

Abstrakti

Every yet-to-be-acquired function of language overlapping with something already acquired triggers a process of rearranging the functions. This paper discusses how to study the ways and order of the acquisition of clause structure and introduces a new corpus-driven way to do that. A method we call Keystructure Analysis provides us a toolkit we can use – together with a syntactically annotated learner corpus – to capture structures essential in different stages of language acquisition. By the aforementioned means we study two syntactical structures in advanced Learner Finnish: i) existential sentence and ii) intransitive sentence similar to the existential sentence. We find out that during the 15-month observation period the use of the existential structure, when compared to Finnish as a first language, turns from quantitative overuse to underuse and the use of the studied intransitive structure from underuse to overuse, respectively. The change is similar in all the five subjects’ subcorpora.