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Neo-Classical Compounds in Student Writing: a Corpus-Based Study Smith, S

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Neo-Classical Compounds in Student Writing: a Corpus-Based Study Smith, S Neo-classical compounds in student writing: a corpus-based study Smith, S. Published version deposited in CURVE February 2016 Original citation & hyperlink: Smith, S. (2012) Neo-classical compounds in student writing: a corpus-based study. Verbum, volume 34 (2): 277-296. http://www.lcdpu.fr/livre/?GCOI=27000100999490 Publisher statement Published by Presses universitaires de Nancy – Editions universitaires de Lorraine. Copyright © and Moral Rights are retained by the author(s) and/ or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This item cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. CURVE is the Institutional Repository for Coventry University http://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open Verbum XXXIV, 2012, no 2, 277-296 NEO-CLASSICAL COMPOUNDS IN STUDENT WRITING : * A CORPUS-BASED STUDY Simon SMITH Coventry University RÉSUMÉ Le présent article examine l’utilisation des composés néo-classiques (CNC) au sein du corpus BAWE (British Academic Written English). Sont étudiés des textes rédigés par des étudiants anglophones et non-anglophones dans le cadre de leurs études de trois disciplines (Anglais, Gestion et Ingénierie). La répartition des CNC au sein de ces catégories y sera discutée. Nous démontrerons que la répartition des CNC dans les trois disciplines varie sensiblement et que l’utilisation des CNC parmi les anglophones diffère de celle des locuteurs non natifs, tandis que son utilisation au sein de groupes non anglophones reste assez homogène. Une taxinomie des CNC est proposée dans le but de faciliter l’analyse qui suivra. Certaines implications de l’étude pour l’ apprentissage de l’anglais sont également présentées. ABSTRACT This article examines the use of neo-classical compounds (NCCs) in the British Aca- demic Written English corpus (BAWE). Academic texts written by students from both English and other linguistic backgrounds, in three academic disciplines (En- glish, Business Studies and Engineering) are studied, and the distribution of NCCs among these categories is discussed. It is shown that NCC distribution in the three disciplines differs considerably, and that native English speaker usage of NCCs is at variance with that of non-native speakers, but that usage among different L1 groups is fairly constant. A typology of NCCs is presented, to aid the analysis which follows. Implications of the study for English teaching are also presented. 1. INTRODUCTION In this study, we look at the distribution of neo-classical compounds (NCCs) in academic English texts, written by both native and non-native students. We look for patterns in the distribution, and explore the * The assistance of Coventry University colleagues Dr Nicole Keng and Professor Hilary Nesi in the preparation of this paper is gratefully acknowledged. 278 Simon SMITH significance of NCC knowledge and awareness in language teaching and learning. Bauer (1988) defines NCCs as words consisting of two or more free morphemes (of Latin or Ancient Greek) which are bound, not free, in the modern language concerned, such as English biology. As is widely known, a large proportion of English vocabulary is of Graeco-Latin (G-L) origin. Many native speakers consider frequent use of G-L words, including NCCs, to be indicative of a greater vocabulary and indeed of a higher level of education, or even social class: Corson (1982; 1985) posited the existence of a “lexical bar” in English, whereby members of certain social classes who do not acquire the vocabulary necessary to express more abstract technical and academic thought are denied full access to the curriculum as they go through the school system. Certainly, a high proportion of scientific and technical terms do take the form of NCCs. Lüdeling (2006) presents some of the historical reasons for the arrival of NCCs in modern European languages. During the European Enlightenment, advances in science meant that much new terminology was needed, while at the same time use of Latin for formal or academic purposes gave way to the vernacular tongues of the continent. A common mechanism for generating needed new vernacular terminology was to borrow and piece together elements from the still prestigious classical languages. In Smith and Keng (2014), we demonstrated that Chinese native spea- kers’ knowledge of G-L words (including NCCs) was weaker across the board than that of French or Finnish students, while Finns had the best knowledge. When only G-L vocabulary was taken into account, the French students improved on their score for items of all origins, while the Finnish students performed slightly worse, and the Chinese performance worsened more significantly. This confirmed our hypothesis that the more G-L words a language attests, the more likely the native speaker of that language is to know English words of G-L origin than ones of unspecified origin. In this study, we build on Smith and Keng (2014) to compare the per- formance of English learners with English native speakers, while at the same time confining the investigation to the use of NCCs, rather than of G-L words generally. We examine student academic writing from the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE1). The corpus includes annotation of the native language of each student author. It is clear that one of the features differentiating the work of writers of different language back- 1 The BAWE data in this study come from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, which was developed at the Universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes under the directorship of Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner (formerly of the Centre for Applied Linguistics [previously called CELTE], Warwick), Paul Thompson (Department of Applied Linguistics, Reading) and Paul Wickens (Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes), with funding from the ESRC (RES-000-23-0800). NEO-CLASSICAL COMPOUNDS IN STUDENT WRITING 279 grounds will be vocabulary choice; and it is also plausible that density and appropriateness of NCCs will contribute to this differentiation. This study investigates the distribution of NCC use by writers of different linguistic origins. The analysis is conducted using both a narrow and wide definition of neo-classical compound, by establishing two sets of NCCs, prototypical and extended, and presenting findings on the usage of both sets. This approach was motivated by the fact that there is no straightforward and unambiguous definition of NCC, with Bauer (1998) observing that “neoclassical com- pounding acts as some kind of prototype, from which actual formations may diverge in unpredictable ways.” Some of these divergences are represented as Types within our framework. The BAWE corpus is also annotated by broad discipline group (life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences and humanities) and by indivi- dual major (Engineering, Business and the like). The study investigates the relative density of NCCs in different disciplines, and seeks to establish whether NCCs, or certain classes of NCC, are more likely to occur in some disciplines than in others. With this in mind, the following research questions are addressed in the present study. RQ1. Is there a significant difference between native and non-native student writers’ work, in terms of NCC density? RQ2. Do students of different non-English L1s use NCCs differently? RQ3. Are any NCCs limited to specific disciplines or discipline groups in the BAWE corpus? If so, do they share any distinctive formal characteristics? 2. ORGANIZATION OF THE PAPER The next section of the paper begins with a survey of the relevant literature. Before any attempt to answer the research questions can be made, it is necessary to determine exactly what lexemes are admitted to the NCC class. The explanatory approaches of various authors will be set out. Following this, and drawing on the various approaches found in the literature, different types of NCCs are consolidated into a typology of pro- totypical and extended set NCCs. The typology will facilitate the subsequent analysis of academic texts, in terms of density and distribution of NCCs, that is the main business of this paper. In the Methodology section, we describe the two-stage procedure by which NCCs are identified in the corpus and other aspects of the data collection. The procedure for distinguishing “difficult” NCCs from those which are commonly known is also explained. 280 Simon SMITH The Results section presents NCC density data at the two stages of data collection, and at the two difficulty levels, by various participant groupings or subcorpora, including native language and academic discipline. The dis- tributions of NCCs in the different subcorpora are then compared in a Discussion section. The paper concludes with an account of the limitations of the study, and of its implications for teaching and learning. 3. BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW Bauer (1988), Amiot & Dal (2007) and Lüdeling (2006) characterize and define NCCs, with examples from a range of modern European languages. Amiot & Dal (2007) offer one of the most constraining definitions of NCC. For them, an item has to meet all of four criteria to be considered an NCC. Both of the item’s components must have existed as lexemes in Latin or Greek. Equally, the components must not be free morphemes in the modern language, so an item such as sociolinguistics would be disallowed. There must be a linking vowel {o} or {i} between the components, and “generally [the words should] belong to the learned vocabulary of scientific or technical fields.” In their study, they treat French lexical items which appear to break some of the constraints, such as ludothèque, which is informal rather than learned, and cassettothèque, which is also informal and includes a non- classical component. It is precisely this sort of definitional difficulty that prompted us to set up our Typology of NCCs, presented below.
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