Easy to understand but difficult to use? Raising ... - CiteSeerX

Easy to understand but difficult to use? Raising constructions and information packaging in the advanced learner variety1 Marcus Callies Philipps-Universität Marburg Abstract This paper examines the frequency of occurrence and contextual use of raising constructions in the written production of advanced German and Polish learners of English, based on material from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and comparable native speaker writing. Raising is an interesting phenomenon to study with respect to both argument realisation and information structure and has been shown to be problematic for child L1 and adult L2 learners of English. In view of the high degree of typological markedness of English raising constructions, raised structures are hypothesised as being underrepresented in the writing of advanced learners, most likely due to avoidance. A quantitative and qualitative textlinguistic analysis of the corpus data reveals that tough-movement in particular is significantly underrepresented in advanced learner writing, and that the learners have problems as to the appropriate use of all types of raising constructions in written discourse in terms of information structuring and thematic progression.

1.

Introduction

Recently, second language acquisition (SLA) research has seen an increasing interest in advanced stages of acquisition and questions of near-native competence, but there are still relatively few studies of advanced learners compared to learners at early and intermediate stages of the learning process. It has been a matter of controversy to what extent and under which circumstances adult speakers of a foreign/second language (L2) can achieve native-like proficiency.2 In many (European) countries the ultimate goal of foreign language teaching at the advanced level is for the students to achieve a near-native command of the L2. However, it is often left unspecified what native-like proficiency means exactly (de Haan 1997: 55). Despite the growing interest in what has also been called the advanced learner variety (ALV), the field is still struggling with both a definition and clarification of the concepts “advanced learner” and “nativelikeness”, as well as an in-depth description of the ALV, especially when it comes to learners’ acquisition of optional and highly L2 specific phenomena in all linguistic subsystems. Advanced learners have typically mastered the L2 rules of morphosyntax, and their written production is mainly free from serious grammatical errors. However, non-native speaker (NNS) writing often sounds unidiomatic and shows subtle differences to texts produced by native speakers

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(NSs). The exact reasons for this “non-nativeness” or “foreign-soundingness” are difficult to pin down and are frequently explained by using vague cover terms such as “unidiomaticity” or “style”. In the last decade, learner corpus research has yielded substantial empirical evidence that texts produced by (advanced) learners and NSs differ in terms of frequencies of certain words, phrases and syntactic structures.3 In a recent overview of the field, Granger (2004: 135) defines advanced interlanguage as “the result of a very complex interplay of factors: developmental, teachinginduced and transfer-related, some shared by several learner populations, others more specific”. According to her, typical features of the ALV are overuse of high frequency vocabulary, overuse of a limited number of prefabs and a much higher degree of personal involvement, as well as stylistic deficiencies, often characterised by an overly spoken style or a somewhat puzzling mixture of formal and informal markers. In addition, there is evidence that another factor that distinguishes advanced learners from NSs is the way they use linguistic structures to organise information in discourse (Carroll et al. 2000). Information structure (IS) management turns out to be problematic even for advanced L2 learners as they experience problems with information sequencing and the end-weight principle in several syntactic patterns (e.g. unusually heavy focus constituents in it-clefts or non-extraposed, thus heavy clausal subjects, see Callies 2006a). The present paper provides a corpus-based examination of raising constructions in the written production of advanced German and Polish learners of English based on material from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and comparable native speaker writing. In raising constructions,4 a subject/object of a subordinate clause is moved to the subject/object position of a “higher” clause (thus “raised”), resulting in a comparatively large distance between syntactic form and semantic meaning, potential ambiguity and vagueness of surface forms. Raising constructions are not only interesting in terms of argument realisation, but also from the point of view of information structure, and have been shown to fulfil important discourse functions (Mair 1987, 1990, Noël 1997, 1998, Givón 2001). The aim of this study is to examine the frequency of occurrence of raising constructions to find out what factors may influence their use, and to what extent discourse-functional principles – which have largely been neglected in the sparse research on advanced learners – play a role in the ALV. 2.

Raising constructions 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 clause-internal 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 occurrences of a verb with a range of combinations of arguments and adjuncts in various syntactic contexts such as transitivity alternations or the middle construction. Among the clause-external effects are for example raising constructions, syntactic operations that move arguments across

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clause boundaries. Three types of raising are recognised in the literature and are exemplified below (raised arguments are given in bold type): (1)

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

(subject-to-subject raising, SSR)

(2)

a. We believe that they retire next week. b. We believe them to retire next week. (subject-to-object raising, SOR)

(3)

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

(object-to-subject raising / tough-movement, TM)

In (1) and (2) above, the subjects of the subordinate clauses, Sue and they respectively, are moved to the subject/object position of the “higher” clauses. In (3), it is the object of the subordinate clause which is realised as subject of the matrix clause. The most typical verbs and adjectives that control or trigger raising constructions have been identified through corpus-based descriptive studies of contemporary English. These findings will be reported in the following sections. In the case of subject-to-subject raising (SSR), there are two possible structural variants with complement clauses that are controlled by a number of verbs and adjectival predicates:5 that-extraposition and SSR as illustrated in (1) above. Biber et al.’s (1999: 732) findings show that in all registers SSR is used for the great majority of complement clauses that are controlled by seem and appear, be likely, be unlikely, be certain and be sure. Thus, SSR is the unmarked variant with these verbs and adjectival predicates. In the rest of this paper, I will concentrate on SOR and TM, and exclude SSR. I will, however, consider a variant of SSR that occurs with passive forms of believe-type verbs (see Section 2.1 below). 2.1

Subject-to-object-raising

SOR typically occurs with cognition verbs such as assume, believe or consider (also termed believe-type verbs), verbs of intention, desire or decision such as expect, need, like, prefer or want, and verbs of discovery, e.g. find (Biber et al. 1999: 696). Givón (2001: 273) observes that SOR “most commonly involves verbs of intention, perception or cognition whose subject is typically a dativeexperiencer”. These predicates may appear in two structural variants: a finite thatcomplement clause and SOR involving a non-finite to-infinitive clause: (4)

a. We believe that they retire next week. b. We believe them to retire next week.

(that-complement clause) (SOR)

In addition, most of these verbs also allow a corresponding passive construction in which the subject of the that-clause becomes the subject of the main clause. Thus, the result is a form of SSR (Biber et al. 1999: 697ff.):

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(passive, SSR)

Biber et al. (1999: 710, 713; similarly Mair 1990: 111) list expect, allow, find, require, enable, ask, prove and consider as the most common verbs that occur in the patterns exemplified in (4b+c) above. Depending on register, with some verbs, notably allow, expect, find and consider (Mair 1990: 113, Biber et al. 1999: 711), the passive construction is even more frequent than the active counterpart.6 2.2

Tough-movement

Mair (1987: 61) claims that it is only a small semantic group of adjectives that frequently occurs with TM, namely “adjectives referring to degrees of difficulty and a number of adjectival and nominal predicates expressing value judgements”, see Table 1 below, which lists the most frequent adjectives triggering TM. Table 1. Most frequent raising adjectives triggering TM in the Survey of English Usage Corpus (875,000 words; Mair 1987) RAISING ADJECTIVE

OBSERVED COUNT

difficult easy hard impossible interesting others (one each) total

36 15 7 5 2 13 78

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 TM. Biber et al. (1999: passim) also identify “adjectives of ease or difficulty” as the semantic group that controls TM,7 and find that “easy, difficult and hard are all notably frequent” (ibid. 719, 728). There are three main structural alternatives with infinitive clauses that complement the adjectival predicates listed above. (5)

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

(non-extraposed to-clause) (extraposed to-clause) (post-predicate to-clause with TM)

While non-extraposed infinitive clauses are rare, Biber et al. (1999: 728ff.) find that overall, TM is slightly more common than extraposition for to-clauses controlled by adjectival predicates 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

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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, as appears from Table 2 below. Thus, neither should be considered the unmarked variant. The fact that they occur in roughly the same proportions in different modes suggests that similar discourse factors are operative (see also the discussion in Section 3). Table 2. Frequency counts of TM constructions with the four most common adjectives of ease or difficulty (per million words) in the Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus (approx. 40 million words, Biber et al. 1999: 728) CONVERSATION

raising adjective difficult easy hard impossible

extraposed 6 6 9 2

raised (%) 6 (50) 10 (63) 14 (61) 1 (33)

ACADEMIC PROSE

extraposed 52 26 4 24

raised (%) 79 (60) 36 (58) 4 (50) 4 (17)

Mair (1987, 1990) did not find any significant difference between the occurrence of TM across speech and writing. He concluded that TM constructions were not typical of informal usage, and considered them to be stylistically neutral (1987: 69). However, in view of the more recent and possibly more representative findings by Biber et al. (1999), TM appears to be more typical of academic prose with three out of four of the most frequent adjectives shown in Table 2. 3.

Textual and discourse functions of raising constructions

Raising constructions have been shown to fulfil important discourse functions in terms of information packaging and thematic progression. Several studies have examined believe-type verbs, seeking to explain the choice between a thatcomplement clause (believe that), SOR with an infinitival clause (believe X to be) and the passive counterpart involving SSR (X is believed to be) by drawing on textlinguistic and information-structural factors. Noël (1997) investigated the reasons for the choice between a that-clause and SOR followed by a to-clause with believe-type verbs. He found that in the large majority (90%) of instances of SOR (believe X to be), the raised object (i.e. the actual subject of the infinitive clause) takes up a referent from a preceding clause in the same sentence or from a previous sentence (1997: 277). The following examples, taken from the NS corpus used in the present study (see Section 5 for further information), illustrate this (raised structures are given in bold, underlined constituents are coreferential). (6)

However, if much older women have children, she is less likely to be able to care for them when they are older. It would be unfair to have a child at

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(7)

Marcus Callies say 60 knowing that you may be suffering from ill health in the near future and expect the child to support you. (LOCNESS) “Crime does not pay”. I have heard this statement a number of times throughout my life. I am at that stage in my life where I believe it to be a question and not a statement. (LOCNESS)

By contrast, the subject of a that-clause takes up a referent from the previous discourse much less often. In fact, the majority of such clauses introduce new referents or re-introduce those that have not been mentioned for some stretch of discourse. Noël (1997: 279) concludes that while contextual givenness seems almost to be a prerequisite for the choice of to-complementation, newness appears to require a that-clause, whose subjects in turn do not need to be new. With regard to the passive variants that represent a form of SSR, Mair (1990: 181) had earlier distinguished between active and passive uses of believetype verbs, stating that the passive version (X is believed to be) allows the promotion of the subject of the complement clause to the subject of the matrix clause, hence sentence-initial position, which is the unmarked position for contextually known/given information. In a subsequent paper, Noël (1998: 1061), however, extended the information-structural function of SOR with active matrix verbs to passive matrices: not just infinitives with passive matrices but also infinitives with active matrices do information-structurally different things from thatclauses. The subjects of that-clauses often introduce “new” referents, whereas the subjects of infinitival complements typically take up previously mentioned referents, irrespective of whether their matrices are active or passive. Noël also showed that in some cases of SOR, a competition of the active matrix clause subject and the given subject of the infinitive for topic position may lead to a referentially redundant situation which can be resolved by using SSR, i.e. a passive matrix verb, see the corpus example below and its suboptimal SORcounterpart in (8b): (8)

a. One in ten Americans now receives food stamps. The federal government considers a family of four to be in poverty if its total income is $14,800 or less. If that same family earns $27,380, it is considered low-income. (LOCNESS) b. If that same family earns $27,380, the federal government/they consider it low-income.

In addition, the passive option is often used to avoid mentioning the active subject (Noël 1997: 26). Only rarely is this variant used to emphasise a non-topical active subject using a prepositional phrase as in (9).

Raising constructions and information packaging in the advanced learner variety (9)

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One case study involved an architect named Sam, who felt the drug made him feel “better than well”. He became more poised, thoughtful, and could concentrate much easier than before. Most importantly, his symptoms of depression disappeared. The drug has also been tested and found safe by all major pharmaceutical agencies. (LOCNESS)

The function of TM 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. Mair finds that the majority of raised NPs in TM constructions refer to given information which is often indicated by the use of pronominal forms and anaphoric devices such as it, these and this (Mair 1987: 63), or a simple (sometimes anaphoric) NP without modifiers (this/that + NP): (10)

(11)

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 [sic] with, the truth is in the numbers. (LOCNESS) 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 [...]. (LOCNESS)

Similarly, Biber et al. (1999: 1728ff.) identify a conspiracy of register, grammatical and information packaging factors, and personal style that influence the choice between TM and an extraposed to-clause. In particular, grammatical complexity and information packaging work together. By contrast, the extraposed variant is used when the implied object of the to-clause presents new information. Then, the object is usually a complex structure which contains another complement clause or a heavy, complex NP with a relative clause or complex modifiers. Thus, raising is dispreferred, since this would result in a heavy, complex NP being the subject. The following lengthy example may suffice to illustrate this interplay: (12)

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. 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

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Marcus Callies 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. (LOCNESS)

In a similar vein, Givón (2001: 272) 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”. He also notes the topicalising pragmatic effect of raising. 4.

Raising constructions in language acquisition

4.1

Previous research

Tough-movement was one of the first complex syntactic structures studied closely in L1 acquisition (C. Chomsky 1969, Cromer 1970, and most recently Anderson 2005). TM constructions were found to be particularly problematic for child learners of English and are consequently acquired rather late, i.e. the acquisition is not complete before the age of nine. Experimental studies (e.g. Cromer 1970, Anderson 2005) have identified three stages in children’s acquisition of these structures: (1) an initial stage in which children assign it 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, sometimes giving adult-like, sometimes non-adult-like readings, and (3) a final stage in which they show adult-like competence. While most of the syntactic phenomena that exhibit a large distance between grammatical function and semantic meaning can be assumed to represent problems for learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), only few of them have been investigated empirically (Kortmann 1998: 156; for semantically marked subjects see Callies 2006b). “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 1979a: 42, Kortmann 1998: 160). Cook (1973) was the first to replicate Cromer’s (1970) experiment with adult L2 learners of English from several L1 backgrounds. Interestingly, on the basis of his results he was able to identify three similar developmental stages in L2 acquisition. Subsequent studies that also replicated Cromer’s study in like or methodologically slightly adapted fashion with EFL learners from different L1 backgrounds produced corresponding results: learners regularly misanalysed the subject of the TM construction as the logical subject, not the object, of the underlying clause (d’Anglejan & Tucker 1975 with native speakers of Canadian French, Cooper et al. 1979 with Arabic and Hebrew EFL learners, Bongaerts

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1983 with Dutch learners, Trosberg 1983 with Danish learners, Chiang & Costello 1983 and Yip 1995 with Chinese learners, and Yamaoka 1988 with Japanese learners). Bongaerts (1983) found that the structure was relatively easier for the Dutch than for the French, Arabic and Hebrew subjects in the other experiments, possibly due to a structural parallelism between Dutch and English. However, Jordens (1977, 1978) reports that with near-synonymous and structurally related sentences (raising, mediopassive constructions and marked subjects), advanced Dutch learners of German showed different acceptability rates. Dutch learners were more likely to accept sentences with “canonical” subjects and objects than sentences with marked (“raised”) subjects or objects. Yip (1995: 153ff.) observed that in production, Chinese learners frequently use what she calls “pseudo-tough-movement”, i.e. interlanguage structures that seem to be misuses of TM as in (13) and canonical TM structures exhibiting overpassivisation as in (14): (13) (14)

I am very easy to forget. (‘I forget [things] very easily.’) Foreigners are easy to be misunderstood. (‘Foreigners are easy to misunderstand.’)

Yip claims that instances like (13) involve more than a mere misapplication or overgeneralisation of TM to underlying subjects (rather than objects). In fact, canonical forms are often, for some learners even consistently, accompanied by passivisation of the verb as in (14), while target-like forms occur only rarely. Chinese learners also show considerable uncertainty with respect to the grammaticality of TM. In view of this evidence, Yip argues that what seems to be a non-target-like use of TM is in fact an innovative interlanguage form that results from a misanalysis of TM in English in combination with an across-theboard subject-raising strategy rooted in L1, L2 and universal preferences (Yip 1995: 156, 159). Thus, Chinese EFL learners interpret structures like (13) as instances of subject raising (‘It is very easy for me to forget [things]’), while a correct interpretation of object-raising (TM) is mapped onto an over-passivised form like I am very easy to be forgot (‘It is very easy to forget me’) (ibid. 168). In sum, previous research shows that L2 learners – similarly to children acquiring their mother tongue – have difficulties in correctly interpreting TM constructions, and exhibit similar developmental stages with more advanced learners showing higher levels of competence. However, most of the studies discussed above suffer from methodological shortcomings, since they have mostly tested meaning comprehension and correct identification of the actual (logical) subject of few items using experimental tasks only (role play, grammaticality judgements, translation). They did not examine written learner production, i.e. contextualised, longer stretches of written texts. The corpus-based approach adopted in the present paper provides such an opportunity, and it also

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allows for an investigation of avoidance phenomena and the role of the principles of information structure in the ALV. 4.2

Why they are difficult to acquire: 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, resulting in more 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 cognitive-physiological complexity of linguistic units: marked structures require more cognitive effort to process them. In the following, I will show that this also applies to raising constructions. Raising is one of the phenomena studied by Hawkins (1986), who proposes that many contrasts between English and German 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 loose-fit correspondence. This can also be observed in raising constructions. In SOR, the raised object is not an argument of the finite, but the non-finite verb: (15)

a. We believe that his teachers retire next week. b. We believe his teachers/them to retire next week.

(SOR)

In (15b) above, the NP his teachers functions grammatically as direct object of the verb (note that the respective pronoun appears in accusative case), with the infinitive clause as object complement. Such an interpretation, however, would in fact result in the incorrect inference ‘We believe his teachers’ (cf. Biber et al. 1999: 696). Thus, in terms of meaning, his teachers functions logically as the subject of the underlying clause (his teachers retire next week), and not as the direct object of the verb. 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. Compare: (16) (17)

a. This problem is difficult to see. b. It is difficult to see this problem. a. John is reluctant to go. b. *It is reluctant to go John.

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He further notes that the relationship between raised constructions such as toughmovement and their underlying bi-clausal forms can be even more obscured by the existence of phrases in which the raised arguments are used as if they were ordinary attributive adjectives (Mair 1990: 63ff.): (18)

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, raising constructions exhibit a larger distance between syntactic form and semantic meaning, since the grammatical subject/object is not the logical or semantic subject/object of these sentences. This results in ambiguity and potential vagueness of surface forms. Consequently, they are functionally and semantically more complex, less transparent and less explicit, are cognitively more costly and require more processing time for the recipient in terms of the analysability and decoding of the form-function relation (Hawkins 1986, Legenhausen & Rohdenburg 1995: 138). 4.3

Typologically-oriented contrastive linguistics and implications for L2 acquisition

Eckman (1977a) proposed a universal implicational hierarchy of raising processes: (19)

Subject-to-object > subject-to-subject > object-to-subject

This hierarchy states that languages that have object-to-subject raising (or TM) also have the two raising types that are higher on the hierarchy. By contrast, there should be no language that has, e.g. SSR, but not SOR. Eckman mentions English, French and German as languages which have all three types of raising, Hungarian, Modern Greek and Polish as those that have SOR and SSR but lack TM (or object-to-subject), and Armenian, Hebrew, Turkish, Egyptian and Lebanese Arabic as languages that only have SOR. Similar to Eckman, Van Valin (2001: 53) notes that “cross-linguistically, matrix-coding-as-subject constructions [i.e. subject-raising, MC] are much more common than matrix-coding-as-object constructions [i.e. object-raising, MC]”. From a functional perspective, TM is a uniform cross-linguistic phenomenon in that it explicitly indicates topicalisation 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 & Matthews 1990: 55). Mair (1992) shows that English allows SOR after several causation and cognition verbs, whereas German does not. Generally speaking, although both English and German have all three types of raising, a contrastive analysis of raising in these two languages shows that in German, raising is more restricted

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and only a subset of the English raising verbs and adjectives occur (König 1971: 85-89, Hawkins 1986: 75ff., König 1995: 155f., 157, Legenhausen & Rohdenburg 1995: 135). In all three types of raising, English is more productive than German because there are many more verbs and adjectives that trigger a certain raising construction (Hawkins 1986: 75ff.). Referring back to Eckman’s (1977a) hierarchy, Polish is even more restricted than German. As for SSR/SOR, Fisiak et al. (1978: 154) note that “few plausible cases of ‘subject raising’ are to be found in Polish”. In other words, English sentences in which the subject of an embedded clause is raised to the main clause subject position have no congruent equivalents in Polish, e.g. (20)

He is thought by her to be very rich. *Jest myślany przez nią być bardzo bogaty.

An exception is the Polish equivalent to the English verb seem (zdawać się / wydawać się) which does allow SSR: (21)

He seems to be glad. On wydaje się być zadowolony.

With regard to SOR, Fisiak et al. (ibid. 151) point out that English allows a choice between two types of complementisers in a context where only one is possible in Polish, namely the that-clause: (22)

a. I expected John to come. *Spodziewałem się Janka przyjść. b. I expected that John would come. Spodziewałem się, że Janek przyjdzie.

Thus, equivalent Polish sentences to I expect/believe you to be honest are ungrammatical in Polish (ibid. 153). Again, one exception is the Polish equivalent to the English verb consider (uważać), where SOR is possible. However, while deletion of the infinitive copula is optional in English, it is obligatory in Polish (ibid. 154): (23)

a. I consider you a winner. Uważam cię za zwycięzcę. b. I consider you (to be) funny. *Uważam cię być śmiesznym.

Finally, in TM constructions there is a systematic contrast between English infinitives and Polish gerundives. While the semantic constraints seem to be similar in both languages, there is a major difference in the type of complementisers selected for the embedded clause:

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a. His name is easy to remember. *Jego imię jest łatwe zapamiętać. b. *His name is easy for remembering. Jego imię jest łatwe do zapamiętania.

A direct translation from English into Polish without a change of complementiser is impossible. One of the very few papers on raising in Polish (Boniewicz 1982) reports that “Raising in Polish is not generally known” and concludes that – compared to English – “the scope of Raising in Polish is very narrow” and “Polish Constructions avoid infinitival complementation” since “non-verbal complements are preferable” (Boniewicz 1982: 98, 109). To conclude, as far as the types and the frequency of raising constructions are concerned, a contrastive analysis shows that English is not only highly marked when compared with Polish and German, but also in a wider crosslinguistic perspective. Givón (2001: 282) 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”. Consequently, English clearly exhibits a higher degree of typological markedness. In this paper, I adopt a functional-typological approach to SLA (Eckman 1996, Giacalone Ramat 2003), which is based on the assumption that the findings and generalisations 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 & 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. When used within the functional-typological approach, the notion of typological markedness is defined as an empirically motivated construct, “determined on the basis of crosslinguistic data” (Eckman 1996: 201f.). This concept has been shown to be highly significant and useful for the prediction of the (non-)transferability of linguistic structures and their learnability, interacting with language transfer. In view of the large amount of diverse empirical evidence, it is widely accepted that L2 acquisition is to some extent influenced by the learner’s native language, and that this influence may affect all linguistic subsystems (cf. Odlin 2003). Thus, the question is not whether or not transfer exists, but when, what, how much and why specific mother-tongue

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phenomena are transferred while others are not. I will use the term language transfer in the sense of crosslinguistic influence, defined as “the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired” (Odlin 1989: 27), thereby incorporating positive transfer as well as interference, avoidance and overproduction. With regard to making predictions as to the learnability of linguistic structures and their (non-)transferability from a learner’s native language, Kellerman (1979b, 1983) initiated a re-evaluation of the notion of transfer. In his view, the learner is an active decision-maker on what linguistic structures may be transferable to the second language. Transfer is seen as a cognitive process subject to a psycholinguistic rather than linguistic understanding of markedness in terms of psychological and perceptual complexity, not structural complexity. 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 TM in particular, can be considered to be problematic even for advanced learners of English for two reasons: 1) they are marked because they exhibit a large form-function distance, and are functionally and semantically more complex, less transparent and less explicit; 2) as far as the different types, frequency and restrictions of raising constructions are concerned, English is highly marked in a cross-linguistic perspective. In sum, raising constructions can be hypothesised as being underrepresented in the writing of advanced EFL learners, most likely due to avoidance (Kortmann 1998: 156). 5.

Methodology and data

The present study adopts a corpus-based approach to the analysis of advanced interlanguage on the basis of written data taken from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE, Granger et al. 2002), which consists of mostly argumentative essays produced by university students of English with different native languages. All of the informants that contributed essays to the corpus share

Raising constructions and information packaging in the advanced learner variety

215

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 (ibid. 14). The corpora used for this study were sampled from ICLE and consist of more than 200,000 words each. They include only argumentative essays produced by students whose native languages are German and Polish respectively, and who studied at universities in Germany/Austria and Poland. The learner corpora will be referred to as GICLE and PICLE, respectively (see Table 3 below). L2 exposure, defined for the present purposes as the amount of time spent in an English-speaking country (for example an extended study-abroad period in the target culture), is generally assumed to positively affect a student’s overall proficiency. Therefore, those students who had spent more than 12 months either living or studying in an English-speaking country were excluded from the study in order to provide for a more homogeneous learner group. Table 3. Corpora used in the present study CORPUS NAME

TYPE

NO. OF ESSAYS

APPROX. NO. OF WORDS

Polish ICLE (PICLE) German ICLE (GICLE) US LOCNESS BRIT LOCNESS total LOCNESS

NNS NNS NS NS NS

350 395 176 165 342

224,000 210,000 150,000 78,000 228,000

The learner corpora were compared to a corpus 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 (mostly) argumentative essays by British university students and grammar school students taking their A-levels, as well as US college students (ibid. 41). The major advantage of this control corpus is that it is comparable to the learner corpora both in terms of text type (argumentative essays) and, broadly speaking, participant age and educational background (graduating high-school and undergraduate university students). The corpus analysis focused on a selection of frequent verbs and adjectives that typically trigger raising constructions (see the discussion in Section 2 above): verbs of cognition (believe, consider, find) and desire and want (expect, like, need, prefer, require, want),8 and the four most frequent raising adjectives difficult, easy, hard and impossible. In addition, 34 less frequent toughadjectives (some of them listed in Rohdenburg 1993: 260) were also examined.9 The respective constructions were extracted on the basis of these triggering verbs and adjectives with the use of WordSmith Tools 3.0 (Scott 1999). The hits were then checked manually and submitted to a quantitative statistical and close qualitative textlinguistic analysis.

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6.

Results and discussion

6.1

Quantitative results

Table 4 gives the frequencies of use of the three types of constructions (thatclause, SOR and SSR with passive matrix verbs) after selected raising verbs in the three corpora. Table 4. Frequency of use of variant constructions after selected raising verbs VERB

THAT-CLAUSE (%) LOCNESS

GICLE

10

SOR (%)

GICLE

PICLE

LOCNESS

GICLE

PICLE

51 60 (86.4) (89.6)

5 (3.2)

7 (11.9)

2 (3.0)

4 (2.6)

1 (1.7)

5 (7.5)

14 (24.1) 6 (26.1) 6 (35.3)

21 (67.7) 7 (33.3) 1 (50)

14 (24.1) 7 (43.8) 2 (28.6)

40 9 44 (69.0) (29.0) (75.9) 13 12 8 (56.5) (57.1) (50.0) 8 1 5 (47.1) (50) (71.4)

23 (44.2) 2 (100) 1 (100) 0

15 (78.9) 0

29 (87.9) 2 (100) 1 (100) 0

9 (17.3) 0

0 0

1 (3.0) 0

0

0

0

0

0

0

24 (100) 81 (38.9)

0

0

0

145 (94.2)

consider

4 (6.9) 4 (17.4) 3 (17.6)

1 (3.2) 2 (9.5) 0

20 (38.5) 0

4 (21.1) 0

3

need

0

0

0

prefer

0

0

0

want

0

0

0

total

176 (50.7)

require find like

PASSIVE / SSR (%)

LOCNESS

believe

expect

11

PICLE

0 1 (6.3) 0

0

58 64 (34.9) (30.8)

40 (100) 97 (28.0)

0 1 (100) 33 (100) 85 (51.2)

74 23 63 (21.3) (13.9) (30.3)

The table shows that in LOCNESS the verb believe most often appears with a that-clause. By contrast, find, want and the infrequent verbs like and need regularly take SOR followed by a to-clause, while consider, expect and require predominantly occur with passive matrix verbs (see figures in bold print in Table 4). The latter result is in line with the observations by Mair (1990) and Biber et al. (1999) reported above, namely that, among others, with expect and consider the passive construction is more frequent than the active counterpart. These tendencies are largely mirrored in the learner corpora, but there are exceptions. The significance tests12 reveal several interesting differences that run counter to the initial hypothesis. Despite the assumed underrepresentation of all types of raising structures in advanced learner writing, with some verbs both SOR and SSR are in fact overrepresented in PICLE when compared to LOCNESS (log-likelihood score G2 of +4.13 and +4.78 respectively, both equalling p