Abstract
We will present a comparative study in which we analyzed the use of the intensified adjective construction [[X]int [Y]ADJ]AP ‘very Y’ in the Italian and German sub-corpora of Kolipsi-1 (Glaznieks et al. forthcoming), a learner corpus for L2 German and Italian. The corpus consists of written essays (around 470,000 tokens) from the multilingual Italian province of South Tyrol. Applying a Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) approach (Höder et al., 2021), which allows us to distinguish idio- from diaconstructions of Italian and German, we replicated previous research from a different multilingual area (Van Goethem & Hendrikx 2021) and analyzed the occurrence of the [[X]int [Y]ADJ]AP ‘very Y’ construction in the Kolipsi-1 corpus on different levels of schematicity using mixed-effect models.
Our research question was: Are there differences in the way L2 Italian and L2 German young learner from the multilingual Italian province of South Tyrol use adjective intensification in written essays?
We found the main difference between learners of Italian and German on the most abstract level of analysis, where we investigated the effect of different variables (e.g., L1, linguistic environment) on the choice of morphological ([[X]AFFIX [Y]ADJ]ADJ) or syntactic intensification types (e.g., [[X]ADV [Y]ADJ]AP). For L2 Italian learners, the linguistic environment is a significant predictor for their choice (Spina et al., in preparation). L2 German learners prefer intensifying adverb constructions regardless of their L1 or linguistic environment.
References:
Glaznieks, A., Frey, J.-C., Abel, A., Nicolas, L. & Vettori, C. (forthcoming). The Kolipsi Corpus Family. A collection of Italian and German L2 learner texts from secondary school pupils. Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics.
Höder, S., Prentice, J. & Tingsell, S. (2021). Additional language acquisition as emerging multilingualism. In: H. C. Boas & S. Höder (eds.): Constructions in Contact 2: Language change, multilingual practices, and additional language acquisition. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins, pp. 309-337.
Spina, S., Glaznieks, A. & Abel, A. (in preparation): Intensification in written L2 Italian: Insights from the multilingual region of South Tyrol.
Van Goethem, K. & Hendrikx, I. (2021). Intensifying constructions in second language acquisition. A diasystematic-constructionist approach. In: H. C. Boas & S. Höder (eds.): Constructions in Contact 2: Language change, multilingual practices, and additional language acquisition. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins, pp. 376–428.