THE USE OF ENGLISH NEGATION BY SPANISH STUDENTS OF ENGLISH: A LEARNER CORPUS-BASED STUDY

Abstract

This paper is based on a research project by the same author; in which the acquisition of the English negation system is investigated. This is a preliminary account and it is corpus-based. Two learner corpora were used: the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) Spanish subcorpus and the Santiago University Learner of English Corpus (SULEC). The former is a sample corpus -it is finished- and it contains written argumentative essays of Spanish speakers. The latter contains both spoken and written data -oral interviews and argumentative texts- and it is a monitor corpus; new data are continuously being added. The Spanish subcorpus of ICLE contains over 125.000 words; whereas SULEC contained over 350.000 words at the moment of the research. A native English corpus was also used in order to contrast the learner and the native use of English negation.

Keywords

• Corpus linguistics (CL)
• learner corpus
• foreign language learning (FLL)
• second language acquisition (SLA)
• English as a foreign language (EFL)