Exploring Developmental Indices in a Spoken Learner Corpus : Focusing on Verb Functions and Semantic Domains

抄録

This study is a part of an attempt to find evidential differences among Japanese English learners at different proficiency levels. In the present study, the focus is put on verbs, especially their classes, functions, and semantic roles. This study differs from the traditional interlanguage analyses in the respect that it uses a spoken learner corpus, which is drawing more and more attention as a new-type of output data in the second language acquisition (SLA) research field. The corpus data was composed of seven subcorpora according to the learners' proficiency levels, and every verb which appeared in the data was put into a certain category. The analyses were made exploring the following two questions: (1) How are the verb classes and their functions distributed according to the learner levels?, and (2) How are the semantic domains distributed according to these levels? The findings imply that the use of auxiliary verbs, especially primary verbs as auxiliaries, reflects learners' high proficiency. Using verbs from three semantic domains, Facilitation/Causation, Simple occurrence, and Aspectual, might be also the sign that learners have progressed beyond elementary levels.