Modelling “Constructional transfer”: A comparative corpus study of morphological and syntactic intensifiers in L1 French, L1 Dutch and L2 Dutch

In this contribution we will present a corpus-based comparison of the use of intensifying constructions in (written) native Dutch (Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands), Dutch by French-speaking learners (Leerdercorpus Nederlands) and native French (Frantext). The central focus will be on the competition between morphological and syntactic means to intensify adjectives. The analysis will take a constructional perspective on language acquisition and multilingualism (cf. Tomasello 2003; Goldberg 2010; Höder 2012, 2014). From such a usage-based point of view, second language acquisition is presumed to be more complex than L1 acquisition because of the competition between the specific constructions of the foreign language with the L1 constructions (Ellis & Cadierno 2009). Applying this hypothesis of “constructional transfer” to intensification, we can assume on the one hand that French-speaking learners of Dutch will underuse typical Germanic means of intensification such as ‘elative’ compounds (knalrood ‘completely red’) (Hoeksema 2012). On the other hand the learners are expected to overuse syntactic constructions frequently used in French, such as adverbial modification (tout rouge, ‘completely red’) and adjectival reduplication (rouge rouge ‘completely red’) (Riegel e.a.1994). The provisional findings of our data analysis confirm our hypothesis. Learners clearly overuse adverbial intensification (96,6%) in comparison to native Dutch speakers (74,4%). Furthermore they underuse intensifying compounds (learners 1,6% vs natives 13,8%) and prefixes (learners 1,8% vs natives 8,4%). At the semantic level, our corpus study indicates that natives apply intensification far more frequently to ‘limit’ adjectives than learners (e.g. totaal verkeerde aanwijzingen, ‘totally wrong directions’) (learners 0,4% vs natives 43,5%). Inversely, learners mostly intensify ‘scalar’ adjectives (e.g. héél goede vraag ‘very good question’) (learners 72,9% vs natives 52,9%) and make more frequently use of ‘extreme’ adjectives (e.g. absoluut perfecte uitspraak ‘absolutely perfect pronunciation’) (learners 26,7%, natives 3,6%) (Quirk e.a. 1997; Paradis 1997, 2001). These results will be compared with the data drawn from the Frantext corpus, to examine the constructional transfer more profoundly. Finally, the different corpus results will be confronted with Höder’s diasystemic approach to multilingualism (Höder 2012, 2014). Concretely this theory would imply that a bilingual person has a unified semantic-cognitive representation of intensification to his disposition with a variety of formal means (morphological and syntactic constructions) to be specified for the different languages. Bibliography Corpus Hedendaags Nederlands (2013). Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie (ILN) 800.000 texts (1814-2013). Available online at Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN). https://portal.clarin.inl.nl/search/page/search Degand, L. & J. Perrez. (2004). Causale connectieven in het leerdercorpus Nederlands. Tijdschrift n/f 4. 115-128. Ellis, N. & T. Cadierno (2009). Constructing a Second Language. Introduction to the Special Section. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 7, 111-139. FRANTEXT, ATILF (2014). CNRS & Université de Lorraine. 271.599.218 words. http://www.frantext.fr. Goldberg, A. 2010 [2006]. Constructions at Work. The nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoeksema, J. (2012). Elative compounds in Dutch: Properties and developments. In Oebel (Ed.) (2012), 97-142. Höder, S. (2012). Multilingual Constructions: A diasystematic approach to common structures. In Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies [Hamburg studies on multilingualism 13], K. Braunmüller & C. Gabriel (eds), 241-257. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Höder, S. (2014) Constructing diasystems: grammatical organisation in bilingual groups. In The Sociolinguistics of Grammar [Studies in language companion series 154], T. Afarli & B. Maehlum (eds), 137-152. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Paradis. C. (2001). Adjectives and Boundedness. In Cognitive Linguistics 12-1. 47-65. Paradis, C. (1997). Degree modifiers of adjectives in spoken British English. Lund: Lund University Press. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum G. Leech J. Svartvik (1997). A comprehensive grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Riegel, M. J.-C.Pellat, R. Rioul (1994). Grammaire méthodique du français. Presses Universitaires de France: Paris. Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language. Boston: Harvard University Press