The overarching goal of the dissertation is to illustrate the relevance of learner corpus research to the field of second language acquisition (SLA). The possibility that learner corpora can be useful in mainstream SLA research has a significant implication given that they have not been systematically explored in relation to SLA theories. The thesis contributes to building a methodological framework to utilize learner corpora beneficially to SLA and argues that learner corpus research contributes to other disciplines. This is achieved by a series of case studies that quantitatively analyze individual variation and the role of native language (L1) in second language (L2) development of English grammatical morphemes and explain the findings with existing SLA theories. The dissertation investigates the L2 development of morphemes based on two largescale learner corpora. It first reviews the literature and points out that the L2 acquisition order of English grammatical morphemes that has been believed universal in SLA research may, in fact, vary across the learners with different L1 backgrounds and that individual differences in morpheme studies have been relatively neglected in previous literature. The present research, thus, provides empirical evidence testing the universality of the order and the extent of individual differences. In the first study, the thesis investigates L1 influence on the L2 acquisition order of six English grammatical morphemes across seven L1 groups and five proficiency levels. Data drawn from approximately 12,000 essays from the Cambridge Learner Corpus establish clear L1 influence on this issue. The study also reveals that learners without the equivalent morpheme in L1 tend to achieve an accuracy level of below 90% with respect to the morpheme even at the highest proficiency level, and that morphemes requiring learners to learn to pay attention to the relevant distinctions in their acquisition show a stronger effect of L1 than those which only require new form-meaning mappings. The findings are interpreted under the framework of thinking-for-speaking proposed by Dan Slobin. Following the first study, the dissertation exploits EF-Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCamDat) and analyzes the developmental patterns of morphemes, L1 influence on the patterns, and the extent to which individual variation is observed in the development. Based on approximately 140,000 essays written by 46,700 learners of 10 L1 groups across a wide range of proficiency levels, the study found that (i) certain developmental patterns of accuracy are observed irrespective of target morphemes, (ii) inverted U-shaped development is rare irrespective of morphemes, (iii) proficiency influences the within-learner developmental patterns of morphemes, (iv) the developmental patterns at least slightly vary depending on morphemes, and (v) significant individual variation is observed in absolute accuracy, the accuracy difference between morphemes, and the rate of development. The findings are interpreted with dynamic systems theory (DST), a theory of development that has recently been applied to SLA research. The thesis further examines whether any systematic relationship is observed between the developmental patterns of morphemes. Although DST expects that their development is interlinked, the study did not find any strong relationships between the developmental patterns. However, it revealed a weak supportive relationship in the developmental pattern between articles and plural -s. That is, within individual learners, when the accuracy of articles increases, the accuracy of plural -s tends to increase as well, and vice versa.

<div>Since the 1990s, grammatical complexity is a topic that has received considerable attention in various fields of applied linguistics, such as English for academic purposes, second language acquisition, language testing, and second language writing (Bulté & Housen, 2012). Many scholars in applied linguistics have recently argued that grammatical complexity has primarily been represented by clausal features (e.g., subordinate clauses), and it is important to study grammatical complexity as a multidimensional construct based on both clausal features and phrasal features (Biber, Gray & Poonpon, 2011; Norris & Ortega, 2009). Thus, this dissertation is a corpus-based investigation on how the use of noun phrases is influenced by two situational characteristics of a university context: academic level and first- and second-English language background.</div><div><br></div><div>I built my corpus by extracting 200 essays from British Academic Written English Corpus, which represents academic writing of (1) undergraduate and graduate students and (2) L1 and L2 students. Noun phrase complexity was then operationalized to the 11 noun modifiers proposed in the hypothesized developmental index of writing complexity features in Biber, Gray and Poonpon (2011). The 11 noun modifiers were extracted from the corpus and counted for statistical analysis via a set of Python programs. With a Chi-square test followed by a residual analysis, I found that both academic level and first- and second-English language background influenced noun phrase complexity but in distinct ways. The influence of academic level is primarily associated with three phrasal modifiers (i.e., attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns, and appositive NPs) and two clausal modifiers (i.e., relative clauses and noun complement clauses). The undergraduate corpus includes more of the two clausal modifiers, whereas the graduate corpus has more of the three phrasal modifiers. This suggests that, in these 200 essays, graduate students tend to build more compressed NPs than undergraduate students. However, the influence of first- and second-English language background derives from a much broader range of noun modifiers, including eight noun modifiers (e.g., attributive adjectives, relative clauses, infinitive clauses). More diverse NP patterns with different noun modifiers are in the L1 corpus than in the L2 corpus. Surprisingly, the L2 corpus has more phrasal noun modifiers (i.e., attributive adjectives, premodifying nouns), which has been argued to indicate advanced levels of academic writing. A qualitative analysis on selected essays reveals that some cases of attributive adjectives and premodifying nouns are repeatedly used by L2 students to help content development in their writing. Overall, this dissertation adds an additional piece of evidence on the importance of noun phrase complexity in writing research.</div><div><br></div>

in English A corpus analysis of the semantic interpretation factors of the French gérondif The aim of this work is to analyse factors influencing the interpretation of the implicit meaning of the French gérondif (Ger), and to explain, on the basis of this research, the semantic functioning of this non-finite verbal form (in connection with its equivalents in Czech). Our departing point is that the Ger form functions as an interpretation instruction, which defines the means of the integration of the action of the Ger into the action of the main proposition. This interpretation instruction defines the semantic invariant of the Ger, and thus its basic meaning; other meanings are derived on the basis of complex interactions of syntactic, lexical and pragmatic factors. The method used to examine these factors is based on a computer analysis of wide data acquired from monolingual and parallel corpora (FRANTEXT and InterCorp). Part I presents a summary of the results of the latest research of Ger and defines the specific factors: morphological which determine the essential interpretation instruction of the Ger (I.1.1) and basic relationships of aspect and time between the Ger and the main proposition (I.1.2); syntactic which define the Ger as a predication (I.2.1), its syntactic function in the context of...

This diploma thesis focuses on semantic diversity of reporting verbs in French and English fiction. Among these verbs there are not only neutral or semantically marked transitive speech verbs but also intransitive ones or those that do not belong to the category of speech verbs but express different circumstances of a speech act. The objective of the thesis is to provide a contrastive analysis of reporting verbs in original and translated English and French fiction texts, their classification and evaluation of different factors that potentially affect their selection. The topic will be studied on the basis of the data from the parallel corpus Intercorp. The thesis attempts to contribute to a better understanding of reporting clauses. The outlined findings may be helpful especially to translators and fiction writers.

This diploma thesis is focused on the analysis of German language equivalents of Czech proverbs in the dictionary of František Čermák Dictionary of Czech Phraseology and Idiomatics 4 (DCPI 4). The introductory part of the thesis characterizes proverbs as a phraseological unit and reflects the current state of Czech and German paremiography on the basis of selected dictionaries. Another theoretical starting point is the issue of equivalence, which in contrastive phraseology or, more precisely, paremiology plays an important role. The analytical part contains of multi-level analysis of German language equivalents of the Czech paremiological minimum in DPCI 4. Equivalents were verified using Hugo Siebenschein's Great Czech-German Dictionary, Duden 11, Hans Schemann's German Idiomatics, the corpuses InterCorp and DeReKo and the Google full-text search engine. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the current state of German-language equivalents in DCPI 4 and offer possible suggestions for improvement. The chosen approach is therefore not only contemplative, but also constructive. Keywords lexikology, phraseology, paremiology, lexicography, phraseography, Corpus Linguistics, equivalence

The present thesis is based on lexicographic processing of pronouns for the Large German- Czech Academic Dictionary (VNČAS). Its aim is to identify processing problems in selected dictionaries in the area of pronouns. Based on the dictionary entries proposed for VNČAS will be demonstrated a possible solution to these problems. The identified problems relate to the following areas: grammar in the dictionary, selection of example sentences, dictionary criminality, and user-friendliness of the dictionary. Key Words: lexicography, pronouns, contemporary German, corpus linguistics, grammar

Applied linguistics has lately been seen in studies of formulaicity of language operating through recurrent word combinations. The present study deals with one type of word combinations, namely lexical bundles (LBs), which are defined as a sequence of three or more words that frequently co-occur in a particular register (Biber et al., 1999). The present study is a corpus-based analysis of four-word lexical bundles extracted from Music research articles (RAs). The Corpus of Music Research Articles (CMRA) of one million words was created in order to perform structural classification of the retrieved lexical bundles and an analysis of their functions. The CMRA includes 110 articles collected from international music journals from various music subdisciplines. In order to find which lexical bundles were characteristic of music research specifically, the findings were compared to previous research based on other academic disciplines. The list of 218 lexical bundles was compared to the one of three different subject areas (Jalilifar et al., 2016) with the purpose of identification of discipline-specific LBs (n=102) which included 20 topic-specific bundles; and general lexical bundles (n=116) which included 56 core bundles shared among Music and three subject areas (Art and Humanities, Sciences and Social sciences). Structurally and functionally, the analysis of the extracted lexical bundles demonstrated that native English expert writers predominantly used preposition-based phrases (50%), with respect to structure; and research-oriented bundles (74%), with respect to function. The findings have pedagogical applications and could be used in courses in English for Specific Purposes.

Different from Generative Grammar which sees grammar as a formal system of how words are put together to form sentences, Construction Grammar suggests that grammar is more than just rules and surface forms; instead, grammar includes many form-and-meaning pairings which are called constructions. For years, Construction Grammarians have been investigating constructions with various approaches, including corpus-linguistics, pedagogical, second language acquisition and so on, yet there is still room for exploration. The present paper aims to further investigate the [V the Ntaboo-word out of]-construction (Hoeksema &amp; Napoli, 2008; Haïk, 2012; Perek, 2016; Hoffmann, 2020) (e.g., I kick the hell out of him.) and propose a new umbrella construction, “X the Y out of Z” (XTYOFZ) construction, for it. Another aim is to examine the usage and comprehension of the XTYOFZ construction by English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as Native Language (ENL) speakers. The usage context, syntactic and semantic characteristics of the XTYOFZ construction were examined through corpus linguistic methodology. Furthermore, processing and understanding of the construction by ESL and ENL speakers were tested via an online timed Lexical Decision Task as well as an online follow-up survey consisting of questions on English acquisition and usage, and a short comprehension task on the XTYOFZ construction. Corpus data shows that in general, the combination of non-motion action verbs (e.g., scare, beat) as X and taboo terms (e.g., shit, hell) as Y was the most common. Also, it was found that the construction occurs mostly in non-academic contexts such as websites and TV/movies. On the other hand, results from the Lexical Decision Task show that ESL speakers access constructional meaning slightly more slowly than ENL speakers. The follow-up survey also reflects that ESL speakers seem to have a harder time to produce and comprehend the construction compared to ENL speakers. By investigating the features of a relatively less-discussed construction and its usage by ESL speakers, this study hopes to increase the knowledge base of Construction Grammar and ESL construction comprehension and usage, particularly on the constructions that are mainly used in more casual settings.

The present thesis is concerned with the issues of phraseology against the background of lexicographical processing with the use of corpus based research. Using a comprehensive set of idiomatic expressions containing the names of animals, discrepancies and particularities of contemporary phraseographical descriptions are studied. The idiomatic expressions are subjected to the analyses within the German Corpus DeReKo and their Czech equivalents in the Czech Corpus ČNK. This is followed by critical evaluation of the existing lexicographical work in the selected dictionaries. The thesis aims to give a new insight into the issues of idiomatic expressions processing in the bilingual dictionary under the influence of new data gained from corpora based studies.

This study compares the frequency and types of hedging devices used in the presidential debate of 2020 between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Many studies have investigated hedging in political discourse, which has been shown to function as a rhetorical strategy in contexts such as political press interviews and political debates. The current study applied corpus linguistic methodology by creating a corpus of transcripts of the two presidential debates of 2020. To establish what types of hedges were used, a theoretical framework from Fraser (2010a) was used to classify the hedges into two main categories: Propositional hedges and Illocutionary hedges. A manual search showed that hedges did occur in the presidential debate and were used by both candidates to some extent. Based on the results, it could be argued that the hedging appearing in the debates was mainly used to create vagueness, express caution, evade taking responsibility for the validity of a statement, and show a lack of commitment to an utterance. The results further showed that Trump used hedges more frequently than Biden did. However, the scope of this study is not suited to make any reliable assumptions regarding whether frequent use of hedging is negative or positive.