SPAN 597 Usage-based Approaches to Second Language Acquisition

Usage-based approaches view linguistic knowledge as emerging from input experience and general cognitive mechanisms. This course explores second language learning and generalization, with a particular emphasis on the notion of constructions. By examining data from experimental methods and corpus linguistics, we will explore the question of how the distributional patterns of linguistic input affect the learnability of a second language. In problem sets, students will be introduced to essential skills for the computational analysis of text corpora (tagging; automatized extraction of n-grams, collocations, collostructions, etc.). Students will also complete an original project, analyzing the learnability of L2 constructions based on the quantitative analysis of linguistic data.