Noun phrase complexity is investigated in the spoken production of two groups of advanced L2 English speakers (L1 Swedish), who are compared to a group of L1 English speakers. One L2 group was resident in London, the other L2 group studied the L2 English teacher’s program at a Swedish university. There were ten participants in each group. Noun phrase complexity involved two types of postmodifiers, preposition phrases (the man in the suit), and non-finite relative clauses (the man reading a paper). The spoken material consisted of a simultaneous retelling of a 14½ minute film clip from Charlie Chaplin’s silent movie Modern Times. Two questions were addressed. 1) What is the distribution on the group level of the number of ‘single’ (one postmodifier) and ‘multiple’ (two or more) postmodifiers? 2) What is the distribution on an individual level of the total number of the two postmodifiers? Results showed that only the group resident in London performed like the native speakers on both single and multiple preposition phrase postmodifiers. Both L2 groups were nativelike on single non-finite relative clause postmodification, while they used significantly fewer multiple non-finite relative clauses than the L1 group. Furthermore, individuals from both L2 groups were in the native range on the total number of both types of postmodification, although the London Swedes had more overlapping results with the L1 individuals. The main implication of the results is that residing in the target language country contributed to the London group performing more like the L1 group on both group and individual levels.

The aim of the study was to compare the use of formulaic language, here called multiword structures, in advanced L2 English speech of two Swedish groups with a group of first language (L1) speakers of English. One Swedish group was resident in London and one in Stockholm, thus implying different degrees of exposure to English. Three categories, notably multiword phrases, multiword utterances and metalinguistic multiword structures, were investigated by comparing quantity and distribution. The groups completed two oral tasks, a role play and a retelling task. The results of the Swedish group resident in London were similar to the L1 English group on all measurements of multiword structures in the role play. In the retelling task multiword phrases were significantly fewer in both second language (L2) groups compared to the L1 English group, although there were L2 individuals within the L1 speaker range. Another question concerned the extent to which the three groups used multiword structures which were equivalents, i.e. transferable between English and Swedish. In the retelling task both Swedish groups produced significantly more equivalents than the L1 speakers. The implications of these findings are discussed.

This study investigates the rate of high- and low-frequency words, types and tokens, in L2 spoken English by two advanced Swedish groups, one studying English at a Swedish university and one living and working in London. They were compared to an English native group and to one another. The material had a multitask design: a role play, an interview and an online-narration. The results for the two non-native groups showed vulnerability on both frequency levels depending on task. Only the London group was nativelike across frequencies in the role play confirming our expectation. The results also show that the London group performed the tasks with a higher degree of lexical diversity and fluency than the university group.

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There is nothing like native speech : A comparison of native and very advanced non-native speech

Nativelike expression in L 2 speech is investigated by comparing quantity and distribution of different types of multiword structures ( MWSs ) in the speech of very advanced L 2 speakers with native speakers. Swedish speakers of L 2 E nglish, L 2 F rench and L 2 S panish (average LOR in the UK , F rance and C hile 7–10 years) performing two oral tasks, a role play, and an online retelling task, are compared with matching native speakers, totalling 140,000 words. The L 2 groups were nativelike in their use of MWSs as social routines in the role play. Collocations, the dominant category in the retelling task, were underrepresented in all three L 2 groups compared to the native groups. Furthermore, the E nglish NNSs were nativelike on more measurements of MWSs than the F rench and S panish NNSs .

L2 English Vocabulary in a long-residency Swedish group compared to a group of English native speakers

Nativelike selection in long-residency L2 users. : A study of multiword structures in the speehc of L2 English, French and Spanish.

The study is aimed at revealing collocational adverb–adjective patterns in the British National Corpus (BNC). The adverbs selected for the study include the maximizers absolutely, completely, entirely, fully, perfectly, totally, utterly, wholly. The study involves searches on both the selected adverbs and the adjectives they modify in a bi-directional fashion. It is claimed that only a cognitive and usage-based approach in terms of underlying conceptual structures can provide an accurate description of collocational patterns. The results show that a large proportion of the adjectives have strong bonds with particular maximizers. This is explained through the basic conceptual structure of Boundedness/Scalarity, i.e. the degree to which the adjective lends itself to a bounded or a scalar construal and the adverb is biased towards a totality construal (which is the kind of construal to be expected from maximizers). The results support the hypothesis that a substantial part of the adverb–adjective combinations investigated are (semi)-prefabricated units, presumably easily accessed by native speakers because the combinations are the result of specific construals and their members have close associative and conceptual links in the mental lexicon.

Following an overview of early frequency-based research of recurring word combinations and patterns, three current methods within SLA focusing spoken and written production are presented. Studies within each of these methodological paradigms are compared from qualitative aspects, such as medium, size of material, control of task, topic and discipline. This is followed by a presentation of a small-scale empirical study using two of these methods, the lexical bundle method and the ‘comprehensive’ method, applied to the same spoken material of very advanced Swedish users of L2 English and L2 Spanish and native English and Spanish controls. Both methods are usage-based, scanning entire texts for multiword structures, one computer-driven, the lexical bundle method, and one largely manual, the comprehensive method. This small-scale study has shown that two different methods, yielding different results, can fruitfully be used together, not only to inform and complement one another, but to broaden our knowledge of what being nativelike involves, not to mention the vast implications such increased knowledge may have for teaching and learning an L2.

In order for discourse to be considered idiomatic, it needs to exhibit features like fluency and pragmatically appropriate language use. Advances in corpus linguistics make it possible to examine idiomaticity from the perspective of recurrent word combinations. One approach to capture such word combinations is by the automatic retrieval of lexical bundles. We investigated the use of English-language lexical bundles in advanced learner writing by L1 speakers of Swedish and in comparable native-speaker writing, all produced by undergraduate university students in the discipline of linguistics. The material was culled from a new corpus of university student writing, the Stockholm University Student English Corpus (SUSEC), amounting to over one million words. The investigation involved a quantitative analysis of the use of four-word lexical bundles and a qualitative analysis of the functions they serve. The results show that the native speakers have a larger number of types of lexical bundles, which are also more varied, such as unattended ‘this’ bundles, existential ‘there’ bundles, and hedging bundles. Other lexical bundles which were found to be more common and more varied in the native-speaker data involved negations. The findings are shown to be largely similar to those of the phraseological research tradition in SLA.

With few exceptions the field of L2 pragmatics has focussed on intermediate and advanced learners and there is little knowledge to date regarding highly proficient, immersed L2 speakers' pragmatic performance. This study concerns L2 speakers having been immersed culturally and professionally for a considerable length of time. Our focus is on-line production of the request sequence by Swedish speakers of L2 English and L2 French having lived and worked approximately 10 years in the L2 country against matched native controls. The task is a role play between an employee and her/his boss implying high demands on the pragmatic knowledge of the participants. Our main results indicate that both groups of L2 users significantly underuse lexical and syntactic downgraders. It is argued in this paper that this underuse is not due to a lack of pragmalinguistic resources, i.e., they use the same types as the native speakers, but is of a socio-pragmatic nature, i.e., they do not downgrade to the same extent. Furthermore, L2 users significantly underuse 'situation-bound' routinized formulaic sequences for expressing the Head act. This result, in contrast, points to a lack of pragmalinguistic resources. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The formulaic language in focus in the present paper is collocations. The ‘intrinsic’ as opposed to ‘extrinsic’ features of collocations related to Frame Semantics and Lexical Functions are proposed to best reflect their unit-hood status. The paper primarily discusses the lexical status and identification of collocations from different theoretical frameworks, and also reports on a study examining the collocations in English essays written by native and non-native writers. The results show that the non-native group (English students at Stockholm University) have a relatively good command of collocations, but also that that their collocational range is reduced and that non-target collocations do occur. The paper concludes with a review of the implications for foreign language teaching more generally.

The study seeks to establish whether pause frequency and pause duration could inform us about the size of linguistic units stored in the mental lexicon. Pauses are seen as a reflection of cognitive effort in lexical retrieval. The basic assumption is that a particular concept starts activating related concepts in a conceptual network via spreading activation. Pausing is assumed to be rare when spreading activation is at work, i.e. in the recall of multiword, or prefabricated, structures. The results show that pausing was significantly more frequent in connection with lexical search in computed as compared to prefabricated structures, thus indicating that prefabricated structures are stored and retrieved as wholes. The most important implication of the study is that the results give further support to John Sinclair’s proposed ‘idiom principle’, according to which strings that would appear to be analyzable into segments nevertheless constitute single choices.