Constructional Emergence in A1–C1: A Bird’s Eye Perspective and Alignment

Abstract

This study aims to take a usage–based constructionist approach to observing the emergence of constructions in L2 speakers of English from a bird’s eye perspective and aligns some of them with CEFR levels. To do this, five equally balanced subparts from the EFCAMDAT corpus were compiled and analyzed using TAASSC and SPSS. The findings present strong evidence for and confirm previous studies that speakers at lower proficiency levels use fixed or prototypical expressions and do not deviate as much from conventional ways of combining constructions, i.e., collexemes. As proficiency increases, their constructicon gets lexicogrammatically richer and less prototypical, as such prototypical examples serves as training wheels for further expansion. While there seems to be evidence for low–frequency constructions to follow a developmental path through CEFR levels, high–frequency constructions do not seem to follow this path. In the end, the study presents a set of constructions aligned for each CEFR level, which appears to be in line with the characteristics of CEFR levels described at englishprofile.org.