Movement Constructions – A Learner-Corpus-Based ... - CiteSeerX

Pre-publication version of the paper that appears in Gabrys-Barker, Danuta, ed. (2008), Morphosyntactic Issues in Second Language Acquisition Studies (SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 29-46. − Please always quote original published version −

Argument Realization and Information Packaging in ToughMovement Constructions – A Learner-Corpus-Based Investigation

Marcus Callies [email protected] Philipps-Universität Marburg Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Englische Sprachwissenschaft Wilhelm-Röpke-Str. 6 D 35032 Marburg Germany

Argument Realization and Information Packaging in ToughMovement Constructions – A Learner-Corpus-Based Investigation 1. Introduction In recent years, the field of second language acquisition (SLA) research has seen an increasing interest in advanced stages of acquisition and questions of near-native competence, or what is considered as the successful acquisition of a second or foreign language (L2). However, there are still relatively few studies of advanced learners compared to learners at early and intermediate stages of the learning process. The question of whether adult L2 speakers achieve native-like proficiency has been controversial1. Moreover, while in many (European) countries the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching at the advanced level is for the students to achieve a nearnative command of the target language, it is often left unspecified what native-like proficiency exactly means (de Haan 1997: 55). Advanced learners have typically mastered the target language rules of morphology and syntax, but their written production often sounds unidiomatic, even though it may be free from grammatical errors. The exact reasons for this nonnativeness or foreign-soundingness of learner writing seem difficult to pin down, and therefore are frequently explained by using vague cover terms such as "unidiomaticity" or "style". Corpus-based research into learner language has yielded empirical evidence that texts produced by learners and native speakers in fact differ in terms of frequencies of certain words or structures, both in lexico-grammar and syntax2. However, an indepth description of the advanced learner variety with respect to the acquisition of optional and highly L2-specific linguistic phenomena is still a desideratum. This paper investigates a syntactic construction which entails both functional principles of discourse organisation (information structure and syntactic weight) and argument realization. Most recently, studies on advanced L2 learners' use of focus

constructions have shown that information structure management remains a problematic area, and that even highly proficient learners do experience problems with information distribution and the end-weight principle in several syntactic patterns (Callies 2006). Moreover, while the acquisition of argument structure alternations has received considerable attention within Universal-Grammar-based approaches to SLA, functional syntactic aspects of these phenomena have largely been neglected in the sparse research on advanced learners. The present paper examines the frequency and contextual use of the toughmovement construction in the written production of advanced German learners of English based on material from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and comparable English native speaker writing.

2. Tough-movement in English English allows a number of clause-internal and clause-external syntactic operations which are either impossible or limited in other languages. One of the clauseinternal effects is the relatively large degree of freedom in selecting the basic syntactic functions of subject and object which results in a great number of alternations, that is language-specific changes in the realization of the argument structure of a verb. Among the clause-external effects are for example the so-called raising constructions, syntactic operations that move arguments across clause boundaries. Three types of raising are recognized in the literature and are exemplified in the following examples. The tough-movement construction, also known as object-to-subject raising (OSR), is illustrated in (3)3:

(1)

a. It seems that Sue is tired. b. Sue seems to be tired.

(subject-to-subject raising)

(2)

a. We believe that they return at the weekend. b. We believe them to return at the weekend.

(3)

(subject-to-object raising)

a. It is difficult to argue with him. b. He is difficult to argue with.

(object-to-subject raising)

While in (1) and (2) above, the subjects of the subordinate clauses, Sue and they respectively, are moved (raised) into the subject/object position of the higher clauses, in (3) it is the object of the subordinate clause which is raised into subject position of the matrix clause. The most frequent adjectives that may trigger tough-movement have been identified through corpus-based descriptive studies of contemporary English. Mair (1987, 1990) observes that it is only a small semantic group of adjectives that frequently occurs with OSR, namely "adjectives referring to degrees of difficulty and a number of adjectival and nominal predicates expressing value judgments" (61), see table 1 below: RAISING ADJECTIVE

OBSERVED COUNT

difficult 36 easy 15 hard 7 impossible 4 interesting 2 total 64 Table 1: Most frequent raising adjectives triggering tough-movement in the Survey of English Usage Corpus (78/85 total instances, 875,000 words; Mair 1987/1990)

Similar accounts can also be found in the standard reference grammars of English. Quirk et al. (1985:1229) note that it is "adjectives referring to degrees of ease and comfort" which trigger OSR, and Biber et al. (1999: passim) also identify "adjectives of ease or difficulty" as the semantic group that control OSR, and find that "easy, difficult and hard are all notably frequent" (1999: 719, 728).

There are three main structural alternatives with infinitive clauses that complement the adjectival predicates listed above:

(4)

a. To argue with him is difficult.

(pre-predicate, non-extraposed to-clause)

b. It is difficult to argue with him.

(extraposition of to-complement clause)

c. He is difficult to argue with.

(post-predicate to-clause with OSR)

While non-extraposed infinitive clauses are rare, Biber et al. (1999: 728ff.) find that overall OSR is slightly more common than extraposition for to-clauses controlled by adjectives of ease or difficulty. To-clauses with these adjectives are most common in academic prose. This holds for both extraposed to-clauses and raised objects. Constructions with difficult and easy are considerably more common than constructions with other ease or difficulty adjectives. In addition, there is no register difference: the proportion of extraposed to-clauses compared to raising constructions is about the same in both conversation and academic prose, see table 2. CONVERSATION

ACADEMIC PROSE

raising adjective raised extraposed % raised raised extraposed % raised easy 10 6 63 36 26 58 hard 14 9 61 4 4 50 difficult 6 6 50 79 52 60 impossible 1 2 4 24 17 Table 2: Frequency counts of to-clause constructions with the four most common adjectives of ease or difficulty per million words (Biber et al. 1999: 728)

Thus, neither should be considered the unmarked. They serve different discourse functions and are used for complementary purposes. The fact that they occur in roughly the same proportions in different modes suggests that similar discourse factors are operative. Mair (1987, 1990) finds no significant difference between the occurrence of tough-movement across speaking and writing, and thus concludes that tough-movement constructions cannot be said to be typical of informal usage and considers this sentence

type to be stylistically neutral (1987: 69). However, in view of the more recent and possibly more representative findings by Biber et al. (table 3, the only exception being hard), tough-movement appears to be more typical of academic prose: RAISING ADJECTIVE

CONVERSATION

ACADEMIC PROSE

TOTAL

difficult 6 (7.1%) 79 (92.9%) 85 (100%) easy 10 (21.7%) 36 (78.3%) 46 (100%) hard 14 (77.8%) 4 (22.2%) 18 (100%) impossible 1 (20%) 4 (80%) 5 (100%) Table 3: Frequency counts of raising constructions with the four most common adjectives of ease or difficulty per million words (adapted from Biber et al. 1999: 728)

3. Textual and discourse functions of the tough-movement construction It has been argued that one of the major consequences following from the fixed SVO word order in English is that this language has developed a wide range of options to cater for the communicative needs of its speakers, still keeping the subject in its required initial position. Most importantly, the grammatical function of the subject has considerably been expanded, both semantically and functionally (see for example Legenhausen and Rohdenburg 1995). In this context, Foley (1994:1679) observes that "there is, in fact, a very strong correlation between the concepts of topic and subject in English. [...] Thus, the typical way to express alternatives of topic choice is to select different subjects. This is very common in English". Among these alternative ways of topic choice are the focus constructions, especially clefting, but also non-agentive subjects, existential sentences, raising constructions and the passive. Thus, raising constructions, and tough-movement in particular, are not only interesting in terms of argument realization, but also from the point of view of information structure, since they have been shown to fulfill important discourse functions in terms of information packaging and thematic progression (Mair, 1987, 1990; Givón, 2001).

Biber et al. (1999) present a corpus-based overview of raising constructions and discuss several factors that influence the choice between either raising or structural variants with extraposed to- or that-clauses. For tough-movement, they identify a conspiracy of grammatical complexity and information packaging (1999: 729ff.). In nearly all instances of tough-movement, the implied object of the to-clause presents given information and provides an anaphoric link to the immediately preceding discourse. The raised noun phrase (NP) is typically a pronoun (it, this, that) or a simple anaphoric NP without modifiers (this/that N)4: (5)

Opposition to the whole idea of orphanages refute it mainly because of two reasons. They disagree with the break-up of families and feel the whole policy would be too costly. While these two ideas are difficult to content with, the truth is in the numbers. (US)

(6)

There were many objections raised against the introduction of the National Lottery when the idea was first proposed. The main issued raised was the unemployment that would occur in the pools company industry. As the Lottery would sound more appealing due to the larger winnings, greater public interest and the fact that it is easier to fill in than a pools coupon, less people would do the pools coupon, and this decrease in demand would mean that pools companies such as Littlewoods and Vernon would be forced to make employees redundent due to a decrease in profits. (BRIT)

By contrast, the extraposed variant is used when the implied object of the to-clause presents new information. Then, the raised object is usually a complex structure which contains another complement clause as in (7) and (8) below, or a heavy, complex NP with a relative clause or complex modifiers as in (9). Thus, raising is dispreferred, since this would result in a heavy, complex NP being the subject. (7)

Boxing is a sport participated in by thousands of people in the U.K. alone. If it were banned, there would inevitably be boxers who still participated not for the money, but for the love of the sport. Also, there is so much money involved in boxing today, millions of pounds in some cases, that it would be impossible to stop illegal betting taking place or underground fights. (BRIT)

(8)

Many constitutional problems still block our road to Europe, as well as people's attitudes - we in Britain rather enjoy being an island and not attached to the continent - witness the opposition to the Channel Tunnel. It is impossible to say whether we will eventually be willing to sacrifice the rest of our sovereignty. (BRIT)

(9)

If we consider that our society rewards valuable labor - valuable contributions with first, economic measures, and, second, measures of status, then the child care worker may reasonably be judged as not providing a "valuable" contribution to society. It is difficult to imagine, however, a society where workers are encouraged to take employment seriously - to say nothing of finding satisfaction from employment - and where the work force is filled with a diversity of willing workers, without considering the fundamental value of child care providers. (US)

Example (10) below nicely illustrates the interplay of extraposition and toughmovement influenced by grammatical complexity and information packaging. The clause that child care workers are underpaid is realized as an extraposed that-clause and subsequently taken up by the NP the issue, which appears as a raised subject: (10) If we recognize that a work force filled with such diversity of workers will inevitably include women - of all ages - as well as man with family responsibilities, then we see the undeniable economic connection between this "low value" contribution of child care providers, and the economic strength of the nation. It is not difficult to conclude that child care workers are underpaid, and the issue will be difficult to resolve without involving employers or the government in the child care industry - which may not be the ideal solution. (US) The function of tough-movement as a means of information packaging is discussed in detail by Mair (1987). He shows that this sentence type serves to appropriately distribute given and new information in a sentence and thus supports the thematic progression of discourse. Similar to what Biber et al. (1999) note, Mair finds that the majority of the raised NPs in tough-movement constructions refer to given information which is often indicated by the use of pronominal forms and anaphoric devices such as these and this (1987:63). In a later, broader study, Mair (1990: 76) considers tough-movement a " 'topic creating mechanism' " and provides further evidence for his analysis: referential-indefinite subjects (underlined in the following example) are normally not raised5:

(11)

Looking through the years of history it is hard to imagine a time when religion did not exist. (US)

In a similar vein, Givón (2001) discusses the function of raising as a means of foregrounding an important topic which is "converted from an argument of the

subordinate clause to a grammatical argument – either subject or object – of the main clause" (2001:272). He also notes the topicalizing pragmatic effect of raising.

4. Raising: A comparative perspective 4.1. The markedness of raising constructions Givón (1991) proposes a definition of markedness that includes the following correlates: structural complexity, frequency distribution, and cognitive complexity. According to these criteria, marked elements are structurally more complex, less frequent and therefore cognitively more salient. They require more attention, mental effort and processing time for the recipient. Givón's understanding of markedness is extremely useful in the present context since it integrates the notion of cognitive complexity, and postulates a correlation between markedness and the cognitivephysiological complexity of linguistic units: marked structures require more cognitive work in order to be processed. Raising is one of the phenomena studied by Hawkins (1986), who proposes that English/German contrasts can be explained in terms of a typological continuum whereby languages vary according to the degree to which morphological and syntactic surface form and semantic meaning correspond. He argues that there is a greater ambiguity and/or vagueness of surface forms in English. While German exhibits a "tight-fit" between surface form and semantic representation, English shows a "loosefit" correspondence. This can also be observed in raising constructions. By making reference to the concept of apparent constituency, Mair (1987: 64ff.) observes that tough-movement constructions are deceptively similar to simple sentences which consist of a subject, a copula and a predicative adjective governing an infinitive:

(12)

a. This problem is difficult to see. b. It is difficult to see this problem.

(13)

a. John is reluctant to go. b. * It is reluctant to go John.

He further notes that the relationship between "fused" constructions such as toughmovement and their underlying bi-clausal forms can be even more obscured in phrases in which the infinitival complements are used as if they were ordinary attributive adjectives (his examples):

(14)

a. ... one of his tremendously hard to understand papers b. ... who speaks fluent but difficult to understand English c. ... in a clear and easy-to-follow manner

In sum, when compared with their underlying bi-clausal variants, tough-movement constructions exhibit a larger distance between form and function, since the grammatical subject is not the logical or semantic subject of these sentences. Consequently, tough-movement constructions are functionally and semantically more complex, less transparent and less explicit, cause more cognitive cost and require more processing time for the recipient in terms of the analyzability and decoding of the formfunction relation (Legenhausen and Rohdenburg 1995: 138).

4.2. Typological considerations and contrastive analysis From a functional perspective, tough-movement is a uniform crosslinguistic phenomenon in that it explicitly indicates topicalization of the raised NP. However, the formal linguistic means to express this function are different from language to language, and correlate with other typological syntactic features such as basic word order and

subject-prominence (Comrie and Matthews 1990: 55). Eckman (1977a) has proposed a universal hierarchy of raising processes: Subject-to-object > subject-to-subject > objectto-subject. Van Valin (2001) notes that "cross-linguistically, matrix-coding-as-subject constructions [his term for subject-raising, MC] are much more common than matrixcoding-as-object constructions [i.e. object-raising, MC]" (2001: 53). Although both English and German have all three types of raising, a contrastive analysis of raising in English and German reveals that in German, raising is more restricted and only a subset of the English raising verbs and adjectives occur (Hawkins 1986: 75ff.; König 1971: 85-89, 1995: 155f., 157; Legenhausen and Rohdenburg 1995: 135). In all three types of raising mentioned in section 2 above, English is more productive than German because there are many more verbs and adjectives that trigger a certain raising construction (Hawkins 1986: 75ff.). Furthermore, as far as the types and the frequency of raising constructions is concerned, English is not only highly marked when compared with German, but also in a cross-linguistic perspective. Givón states that "English may be the most promiscuous language when it comes to raising. Other languages, even when typologically rather close to English, allow little or no raising" (2001: 282). Consequently, English clearly exhibits a higher degree of typological markedness.

5. Previous studies and research hypotheses While most of the syntactic phenomena that exhibit a large distance between grammatical function and semantic meaning can be assumed to represent learning problems for learners of English as a foreign language, only few of them appear to have been investigated empirically6 (Kortmann 1998: 156). Tight-fit, that is more explicit and semantically transparent structures in the L2 have been shown to be acquired earlier, are preferred options, and have a wider range of application also in the advanced stages of

the learning process. By contrast, loose-fit, that is less explicit and semantically opaque variants are avoided, even when they exist in the L1 (Kellerman 1979: 42, Kortmann 1998: 160). As reported by Kellerman (1983: 118f.), Jordens (1977, 1978) found that with near-synonymous and structurally related sentences (raising, mediopassive constructions and non-agentive subjects), advanced Dutch learners of German showed different acceptability rates. Thus, Dutch learners are more likely to accept sentences with canonical subjects and objects better than sentences with marked (for example raised) subjects or objects. I adopt a functional-typological approach to SLA (Eckman 1996, Giacalone Ramat 2003), which is based on the assumption that the findings and generalizations made by language typologists can also be applied to language acquisition, and argues for the significance of universal (implicational) hierarchies for the prediction and explanation of (non-)transfer in SLA. The basic assumption is that interlanguages (ILs) are natural languages. If typological language universals are universal to all natural human languages, then they should also hold for ILs, as captured by the Interlanguage Structural Conformity Hypothesis: "All universals that are true for primary languages are also true for interlanguages" (Eckman, Moravcsik and Wirth 1989: 195). Since many language universals can be expressed in terms of (implicational) hierarchical relations with respect to cross-linguistic/typological markedness, it is reasonable to assume that such hierarchical relations between linguistic phenomena should also be present in ILs. Consequently, it should be possible to predict the occurrence of selected linguistic features in ILs, depending on their position in the hierarchy and the relative degree of typological markedness. Eckman (1977b) introduced the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) and argued that on the basis of a contrastive analysis of two languages (L1 and L2) and the inclusion of the concepts of typological markedness and cross-linguistic influence, it

should be possible to predict areas of difficulty for an L2 learner. In a nutshell, the MDH claims that L1 structures that are different from L2 structures and typologically more marked will not be transferred, whereas L1 structures that are different from L2 structures and typologically less marked are more likely to be transferred. Additionally, predictions can be made as to both the order and difficulty of linguistic features in the acquisition process: Less marked structures will be acquired first or without difficulty, more marked structures are expected to be acquired later or with greater difficulty. In sum, the MDH identifies potential difficulties in the L2 learning process not merely on the basis of similarities and differences derived from a contrastive analysis (CA) of two languages (as in traditional CA), but through a combination of the concepts of typological markedness and crosslinguistic influence. I argue that raising constructions, and tough-movement in particular, can be considered to be problematic even for advanced German learners of English for two reasons: •

Raising constructions are marked because they exhibit a large form-function distance, and are functionally and semantically more complex, less transparent and less explicit

•

As far as the different types, frequency and restrictions of raising constructions are concerned, a contrastive analysis shows that English is not only highly marked when compared with German, but also in a cross-linguistic perspective.

In sum, raising constructions, and in view of its high degree of typological markedness tough-movement in particular, can be hypothesized to be underrepresented in the writing of advanced German learners, most likely due to avoidance (Kortmann 1998: 156). These assumptions for the acquisition of tough-movement in advanced L2 acquisition receive support from research findings in L1 acquisition which show that

tough-movement constructions are also particularly problematic for child learners of English and are consequently acquired late (most recently Anderson 2005). Experimental studies have identified three stages in children's acquisition of toughmovement structures: (1) an initial stage in which children assign the tough-movement structure non-adult-like readings, interpreting the subject NP as the subject rather than as the object of the infinitive verb, 2) an intermediate stage in which they vary in their responses, and (3) a final stage in which they show adult-like competence. The intermediate stage is characterized by the fact that children sometimes give adult-like, sometimes non-adult-like readings.

6. Methodology and data The present study is a corpus-based investigation of the frequency and contextual use of the tough-movement construction on the basis of written data taken from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE, Granger et al. 2002). It is a raw, that is unannotated corpus, which consists of mostly argumentative essays produced by university students of English with different native languages. The corpus was compiled on the basis of rather strict design criteria. All of the informants that contributed essays to the corpus share the following characteristics: they are all university undergraduates in their twenties, have learned English in an EFL context involving classroom instruction, and are usually in their third or fourth year of studies. Thus, their English proficiency level ranges from higher intermediate to advanced, proficiency being assessed on external criteria, namely institutional status (Granger et al. 2002:14). There are also a number of variable features, the most important one of course being the learner's native language, but also variables such as knowledge of other foreign languages or L2 exposure. The German subcorpus consists of 235,190 words

and includes 439 essays produced by students from several universities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. For the present purposes, the aim was to establish learners' global proficiency in their L2 English. For practical reasons, external criteria such as institutional status had to be applied. German learners of English were considered to be advanced in terms of their institutional status if they were undergraduate students of English language and linguistics, and/or literature in their 2nd or 3rd year of university studies, usually enrolled in either a Magister (MA) or teacher training program7. The learners' institutional status was supplemented by two other external learner variables that are vital to determine whether they can be said to have a similar level of advanced proficiency: length of formal English language instruction at school and amount of L2 exposure. These were chosen to ensure that the informants' first or second foreign language is English and that they have had approximately the same degree of practical language training at school. Only those informants who had received at least 7 years of formal instruction at school before they entered university were considered to be advanced and thus included in the present study. Also important is the amount of L2 exposure, defined for the present purposes as the amount of time learners have spent in an English-speaking country. Assuming that an extended study-abroad period in the target culture affects L2 proficiency, it is likely that it does lead to improvement of a student's overall proficiency. Thus, it was considered necessary to control the variable of L2 exposure. Students who had spent more than 4 months either living or studying in an English-speaking country were excluded from the study. Given that the proficiency level of students who contributed to the corpus is almost exclusively based on institutional status, it was necessary to compile a subcorpus for the present study which included only writing by those German learners who can be

considered advanced as defined above. The ICLE is distributed on a CD-ROM which is organized in database format. It includes a software interface which allows the compilation of one's own corpus of learner writing based on selected learner variables (cf. Granger et al. 2002: 47). The subcorpus compiled for this study consists of approximately 80,000 words and includes mostly argumentative essays produced by students whose native language is German, who studied at universities in Germany or Austria, and who have had a minimum of 7 years of instruction in English at school and a maximum of 3 years of English at university. The learner corpus was compared to two corpora of similar writing produced by native speakers of British and American English, sampled from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), which consists of a total of 300,000 words of argumentative essay writing by British and American students (cf. Granger et al. 2002: 41). The major advantage of these control corpora is that they are comparable to the learner corpus as to both text type (argumentative essays) and participant characteristics (university students). For the present study, I compiled two corpora on the basis of LOCNESS, consisting of again approximately 80,000 words of argumentative essay writing produced by British grammar school and university students, and US-American college students. Tough-movement constructions were extracted from the corpora on the basis of the most frequent triggering adjectives that have been outlined in section 2. All instances were submitted to a quantitative statistical and close qualitative textlinguistic analysis.

7. Results and discussion Table 4 shows the frequencies of use of tough-movement with the four most frequent adjectives in the native speaker and learner corpora.

easy hard difficult impossible total

BRIT

US

LEARNERS

extra- raised % raised posed 4 5 55.5 4 4 50 11 5 31.25 9 0 0 28 14 33.3

extra- raised % raised posed 7 8 53.3 4 7 63.6 10 3 23.1 5 3 37.5 26 21 44.7

extra- raised % raised posed 9 1 10 8 1 11.1 8 5 38.5 8 0 0 35 7 16.6

Table 4: Frequency of use of tough-movement in the corpora

The significance tests8 that were carried out show a very significant underrepresentation of tough-movement constructions in learner writing (table 5). corpus US BRIT L L vs. US L vs. BRIT

words 80,133 79,096 79,735

sentences 3755 2762 3525

tough-movement 21 14 7

log-likelihood (G2)

p

- 6.5 - 4.4

< 0.05 < 0.05

Table 5: Observed frequency counts and significance tests for the use of toughmovement in the corpora

Turning to a qualitative analysis of the tough-movement constructions used by the native speakers and learners, it is striking that there are no instances of fused constructions in the learner corpus, see table 6. Examples of the native speakers' use of these are given in (15) – (17) below. BRIT

US

LEARNERS

raised fused raised fused raised fused easy 5 8 1 1 6 0 hard 4 7 1 0 1 0 difficult 5 3 5 1 1 0 impossible 0 3 0 0 0 0 Table 6: Occurrence of "fused" tough-movement constructions in the corpora

(15) Students may find someone to show them morals, but usually, children entrapped in a negative situation may not know to look for outside help. For this reason, the government should have public schools institute religious activities after class periods are finished, so that students could practice their religion if they wanted to. This would not be a difficult or controversial activity to establish. (US) (16) Then a recent T.V. documentary proved that not only were infected animals sent for slaughter, but that safety precautions were inadequate and BSE was being sent

to shops across the country. The government strenuously denied this, making matters worse, and as nobody knows the real situation or even if CJD can be caught from eating infected beef, many people would seem unwilling to take the risk. The recent headlines made by small isolated numbers of deaths from CJD have not helped either. A shorter and easier to explain cause of the fall in beef sales that has been recorded is that increasing numbers of people are becoming vegetarian. (BRIT) (17) The proponents know nuclear waste is harmful and acknowledge that, but their argument is that there is just so little of it out there, and today's storage techniques are so advanced, there is nothing to worry about. Though simple, easy-tounderstand facts such as: the average American can easily relate to the amount of waste being produced. (US) Also interesting are the following instances which constitute a "blended" use of two types of raising (subject-to-object raising and tough-movement):

(18) Women now can have the treatment, successfully, and give birth to healthy children late on in life. Although some British doctors disapproved of such methods this treatment is easily found abroad. The desire to have children is so great mothers can pay thousands of pounds in the hope they may concieve. I find this to be a difficult issue to agree or oppose ... (BRIT) (Cf. I find that this is a difficult issue to agree or oppose. / I find that it is difficult to agree or oppose (to) this issue.) (19) If a scientist can see a possible misuse of what he has found, he has a moral responsibility to act accordingly either in careful presentation when he publishes the results, in order to detract from the dangerous potential of his find, or, in extreme cases, through not even publishing his results at all. All of these considerations are continually growing more important as people look to science, almost as a new religion. As people find religion harder to stomach (often due to scientific discoveries - for example there is no heaven in the clouds, nor a hell under the ground) and see its feasibility shaken to its roots, they begin to seek a new truth where the problems with the old truth began. (BRIT) (Cf. As people find that religion is hard to stomach [...] and that its feasibility is shaken to its roots ... / As people find that it is hard to stomach religion ...) No such uses could be found in the learner corpus. Finally, the following examples from the learner corpus (L) illustrate potential problems in the use of tough-movement for the learners. (20) is an example where a tough-movement construction seems to have been avoided, while (21) exemplifies the non-use of tough-movement, the use of which would have significantly improved the thematic progression of the text:

(20) I remember these days when he made me learning skiing. I was few years old where me and my parents went to Switzerland for our winter holidays. In the backside of the car layed my new skies and a new pair of shoes. I was very nervous and excited about my first day on skiing. It wasn't easy for my father to teach me, or better, I wasn't easy for him. (L) (Cf. I wasn't easy for him to teach.) (21) As I think that I have explained of what an enormous importance the joys of life are for me, I want to think of what they are. It is very difficult to define them, and it is also not easy to say what they really are. (L) (Cf. They are very difficult to define ...)

8. Conclusion This paper has examined the frequency and contextual use of the toughmovement construction in the written production of advanced German learners of English. It has been shown that tough-movement is significantly underrepresented in the writing of advanced German learners. By adopting a functional-typological approach to SLA, I have argued that the cause of this underrepresentation is avoidance due to two main interacting reasons. First, the tough-movement construction in English, and its fused variants in particular, exhibits a high degree of typological markedness. Second, it is characterized by functional and semantic complexity, and comparatively little transparence and explicitness due to a large form-function distance in terms of argument realization. The results of this study also support previous findings that advanced learners avoid loose-fit, that is less explicit and semantically opaque variants (for example nonagentive subjects or mediopassives), even when they do exist in the L1.

Notes 1

See for example Birdsong (1999) for studies that investigate advanced learners' success in areas such as phonology, grammar and discourse. 2 See Hinkel (2002) for a comprehensive and detailed analysis of English native speakers' and second language writers' texts. Studies that focus on specific linguistic features are for example

Lorenz (1999) on adjective intensification, Boström Aronsson (2001, 2003) on clefts and extraposition, Granger and Tyson (1996) on connectors, Granger (1997) on participle clauses, and Callies (2006b) on a number of lexico-grammatical and syntactic focusing devices. 3 Raised arguments are given in bold type. 4 The following examples are taken from writing produced by native speakers of British (BRIT) and American English (US), sampled from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), which consists of a total of 300,000 words of argumentative essay writing by British and American students, see section 6 below. Possible grammar and spelling mistakes habe been preserved. Tough-movement constructions are given in bold type, underlined strings are co-referential. 5 Similarly also Givón (2001:276) who states that "raising (at least with most verbs) seems to select definite or generic referents but reject REF-indefinites". 6 For an empirical study that investigates the acceptance of English marked subjects by advanced German learners see Callies (2006a). 7 The term undergraduate is not directly applicable to the German university system. By "undergraduate students" I refer to students who are typically in their Grundstudium and who have not yet taken their intermediate exams, thus not yet advanced to, broadly speaking, graduate level, the Hauptstudium. 8 Statistical measures were calculated using the Log-likelihood calculator provided by Paul Rayson at Lancaster University, available at http://lingo.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html. The loglikelihood is calculated by constructing a contingency table and comparing the number of observed and expected cases for a specific device in each corpus, based on the number of sentences in each corpus. The higher the G2 value, the more significant the difference between two frequency scores. A G2 of 3.8 or higher is significant at the level of p < 0.05, and a G2 of 6.6 or higher is significant at p < 0.01. The plus or minus symbol before the log-likelihood value indicates overuse or underuse respectively in corpus 1 relative to corpus 2.

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