scholarly journals THE WEB AS CORPUS AND ONLINE CORPORA FOR LEGAL TRANSLATIONS

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 35-56
Author(s):  
Patrizia GIAMPIERI
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Legal System ◽  
The Other ◽  
Online Resources ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
Advanced Search ◽  
Language Knowledge ◽  
Lexical Phrases ◽  
The Web

Legal language is hallmarked by a pedantic and user-unfriendly jargon whose constructs are all but intuitive, not to mention the legal system specificity which makes it unique in every country. Second language (L2) learners or scholars, hence, may find it difficult to understand the language of the law; whereas translators may consider legal lexical phrases and patterns rather intricate to deal with. The literature claims that a practical way to deepen language knowledge can be found in the Web considered as corpus and in online corpora. This paper is aimed at exploring whether commercial search engines, Web concordancers and online specialised corpora can tackle the issues revolving around legal language. In particular, it will investigate whether Google advanced search and the Leeds Web concordancer  can be used to meet the requirements of legal language learners, scholars and translators. Furthermore, it will address legal language queries (and results) in an online specialised corpus: the COCA. This paper will provide instances of the soundness of the above-mentioned online resources, especially when used jointly as cross-analysis tools. The shortcomings of one can, in fact, be compensated for by the other(s).

Googleology for second language learning

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-469
Author(s):  
Patrizia Giampieri
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learning ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Language Skills ◽  
Linguistic Research ◽  
Advanced Search ◽  
The World ◽  
Google Search

Abstract The World Wide Web has often been considered too vast to be consulted for linguistic purposes or for language learning. This paper will explore whether second language learners can be taught how to navigate the web (i.e., how to perform Google linguistic research, or “Googleology”), in order to improve their language skills. To this aim, a 2 h trial lesson was organized. The trial lesson was delivered to 78 apprentices, divided into groups of 10–15, over a period of six months. During the lesson, the participants were taught how to work with Google Advanced Search syntax. At the end of the lesson, they applied the newly-acquired skills by completing a few tasks concerning term and/or collocational search. The paper findings will highlight that, despite initial hesitation or inaccuracies in completing the exercises, the tasks were performed well. The participants considered the lesson interesting, useful and enjoyable. They felt engaged irrespective of the level of their second language (L2) knowledge, and were more confident in approaching Google Search for linguistic purposes.

First Person Singular

2012 ◽  
pp. 22-40
Author(s):  
Shaoqun Wu ◽  
Ian H. Witten
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Digital Library ◽  
Second Language Learning ◽  
First Person ◽  
Library Collection ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Library Technology ◽  
The Web

We use digital library technology to help language learners express themselves by capitalizing on the human-generated text available on the Web. From a massive collection of n-grams and their occurrence frequencies we extract sequences that begin with the word “I”, sequences that begin a question, and sequences containing statistically significant collocations. These are preprocessed, filtered, and organized as a digital library collection using the Greenstone software. Users can search the collection to see how particular words are typically used and browse by syntactic class. The digital library is richly interconnected to other resources. It includes links to external vocabularies and thesauri so that users can retrieve words related to any term of interest, and links the collection to the web by locating sample sentences containing these patterns and presenting them to the user. We have conducted an evaluation of how useful the system is in helping students, and the impact it has on their writing. Finally, language activities generated from the digital library content have been designed to help learners master important emotion related vocabulary and expressions. We predict that the application of digital library technology to assist language students will revolutionize second language learning.

scholarly journals LE PRÉAMBULE DE LA CONSTITUTION COMME UN EXEMPLE D'UN TEXTE DE DROIT

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 51-66
Author(s):  
Piotr PIEPRZYCA
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
The Other ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
Legal Text ◽  
Form And Function ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Almost All ◽  
And Function

Preamble to the Constitution is a special type of legal text, which differs significantly from the other legislative texts, both in terms of vocabulary, syntax and semantics. This paper aims to make the characteristics of the legal language of the preamble to the Constitution – its content, form and function it plays in the legal system. The linguistic corpus is composed of over twenty preambles to constitutions of European countries. The results show that, despite some differences between the preambles of individual European countries, there are many features in common – almost all mention the values and principles, considered as fundamental to the nation, such as independence, freedom or democracy. Some preambles also refer to the history of the country or religion and to the person of God – both indirectly and directly. Despite the fact that the preamble in terms of language is not like other legal texts, it has the characteristics of a normative act.

scholarly journals The Effect of Teacher Talk Modifications on Second Language Learners’ Comprehension and Acquisition

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 154-160
Author(s):  
Nouroddin Yousofi ◽  
Khosro Bahramlou
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Teacher Talk ◽  
Review Of Literature ◽  
Language Knowledge ◽  
L2 Learners

In this review of literature, we have explored the effect of pre-modified input, interactionally modified input, and modification of information structure on the comprehension and acquisition of second language (L2) learners. While the effect of modifications on comprehension is evident, the same cannot be said of acquisition. Some studies support the effect of modifications on acquisition, yet others shed doubts on the value of modifications in terms of promoting internalization of language knowledge.

scholarly journals Input type effects on students’ written narrative responses

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohd Izwan Ramlee
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Pilot Study ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Visual Input ◽  
The Other ◽  
Written Responses ◽  
Input Type ◽  
Similar Content

This pilot study examines the differences of second language learners’ written responses when they are given two different input types with similar content. One input was through written narrative or visual only input, where the learners need to read, and the other was a performed narrative or audio-visual input, where learners need to watch. Learners were then required to respond to the input by completing the narratives. Results showed that there were no major discrepancies in terms of complete/incomplete storylines, length, and number of dialogues, but revealed that the audio-visual input influenced learners more as their responses have a stronger correspondence to the traits in the performance rather than the written narrative.

scholarly journals Increasing fluency in L2 writing with singing

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenni Alisaari ◽  
Leena Maria Heikkola
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
L2 Writing ◽  
The Other ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Pedagogical Methods

Fluency is an essential part of a language learner’s skills. Despite various studies on fluency, little is known about the effects of different pedagogical methods on the development of written fluency. In this paper, we examine how different pedagogical methods affect the development of second language learners’ written fluency. Participants in this study were 51 language learners enrolled in two intensive Finnish courses. The pedagogical methods investigated in the study were singing, listening to songs, and reciting lyrics of songs. Written stories based on cartoon strips were used as a pretest and a posttest. The fluency of written stories was analyzed based on the number of words used in the texts. Differences between the groups taught by different pedagogical methods were analyzed. The results seem to indicate that fluency increased the most in the singing groups compared to the other groups. There was also a statistically significant difference between the singing group and the group reciting lyrics, as well as between the group listening to songs and the group reciting lyrics.

scholarly journals Utilizing lexical data from a Web-derived corpus to expand productive collocation knowledge

ReCALL ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaoqun Wu ◽  
Ian H. Witten ◽  
Margaret Franken
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Digital Library ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Expert User ◽  
Innovative System ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Lexical Data ◽  
The Web ◽  
National Corpus

AbstractCollocations are of great importance for second language learners, and a learner’s knowledge of them plays a key role in producing language fluently (Nation, 2001: 323). In this article we describe and evaluate an innovative system that uses a Web-derived corpus and digital library software to produce a vast concordance and present it in a way that helps students use collocations more effectively in their writing. Instead of live search we use an off-line corpus of short sequences of words, along with their frequencies. They are preprocessed, filtered, and organized into a searchable digital library collection containing 380 million five-word sequences drawn from a vocabulary of 145,000 words. Although the phrases are short, learners can browse more extended contexts because the system automatically locates sample sentences that contain them, either on the Web or in the British National Corpus. Two evaluations were conducted: an expert user tested the system to see if it could generate suitable alternatives for given text fragments, and students used it for a particular exercise. Both suggest that, even within the constraints of a limited study, the system could and did help students improve their writing.

Referential place-holding in Chinese children's acquisition of English articles

1994 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kang Lee ◽  
Catherine Ann Cameron ◽  
Murrary J. Linton ◽  
Anne K. Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learning ◽  
First Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
Coding Scheme ◽  
English Articles

ABSTRACTThis longitudinal study examines the acquisition of English articles by three 6-year-old, second language learning children whose native tongue is Chinese, a language without articles. Brown's coding scheme and an extended coding scheme were used in scoring the corpora of children's responses to a Syntax Elicitation Task. Results revealed that the Chinese children's acquisition of the definite article differed from- what had been previously found using Brown's coding scheme with English as first language learners and second language learning children of other native language origins. Chinese children's use of the definite article developed through an unmarked phase, a referential place-holding phase, a marked phase, and a referential substitution phase before the definite article was fully acquired. The acquisition of the indefinite article, on the other hand, was similar to the acquisition pattern already reported for children learning English as a first language or as a second language. It is suggested that referential place-holding, as well as referential substitution, might not be a Chinese-specific second language learning phenomenon; rather, they might be derived from a universal referential strategy for learning articles.

The Web as a legal language resource

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-121
Author(s):  
Patrizia Giampieri
Keyword(s):  
Legal Language ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Advanced Search ◽  
Language Research ◽  
Language Resource ◽  
Recurrent Patterns ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Web ◽  
Selection Of

Abstract The literature has long explored the Web as corpus for language research and practice. However, little has been written on the Web as a legal language resource. This paper is aimed at exploring the Web as a tool which can provide answers to legal language queries. In this respect, it will show how Google advanced search and the WebCorp Web concordancer can shed light on legal language and bring recurrent patterns to the surface. To this aim, a few issues will be addressed touching upon the query search syntax, the choice of the best translation candidates, the extraction of frequent collocations, the noticing of high recurrences, etc. Considering the shortcomings and the advantages of Google advanced search and of the WebCorp Web concordancer, the paper findings will argue that the Web as corpus can be a reliable legal language resource as long as a selection of tools are used, and the query syntax is accurate.

scholarly journals The effect of construction frequency and native transfer on second language knowledge of the syntax–discourse interface

2013 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-699 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROUMYANA SLABAKOVA
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Syntactic Form ◽  
English Second Language ◽  
Language Knowledge ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Discourse Interface

ABSTRACTThis article investigates knowledge of discourse-conditioned left dislocations in the interlanguage competence in Spanish and English second language learners. Although Spanish clitic left dislocation (CLLD) and English topicalization are functionally very similar, they differ in that the former but not the latter requires the dislocated phrase to be clitic doubled. In contrast, the fronted focus (FF) construction is functionally and syntactically similar in the two languages. Two experimental studies investigated knowledge of the syntactic form and discourse appropriateness of CLLD and topicalization, using knowledge of FF as a baseline. English-native learners of Spanish were successful in acquiring CLLD as well as FF. However, Spanish-native learners of English demonstrated no knowledge of English topicalization even at near-native levels of proficiency, whereas they did well on the transferable FF. These results are examined in the light of the interface hypothesis. It is argued that construction frequency in the input and transfer from the native language, but only those two factors together, can explain the experimental results.

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