Investigating coreference use in L2 German: A corpus study
Date:
Abstract
The use of coreference influences writing fluency in a second language (L2) (Tian et al., 2021), text comprehension (e.g., Berkemeyer, 1994) and accuracy of a text (e.g., Bui, 2022). Cohesion in general and more specifically coreference use is being impacted by language proficiency (Yang & Sun, 2012) as well as by the native language (L1) of an L2 writer, since students tend to rely on L1 strategies to create cohesive texts, which may differ from the strategy used in the L2 (Roberts et al., 2008). This challenge has been documented in studies into L2 English (e.g., Grüter et al., 2017; He, 2020; Kang, 2009). For example, He (2020) investigated the use of coreference by L1 Chinese writers and found differences compared with L1 English texts, such as an underuse of demonstrative references. In stark contrast to L2 English, research on coreference in L2 German has been scarce to date. The few existing studies focus on specific coreference types, such as possessives (e.g., Fabricius-Hansen et al., 2021) and pronominal adverbs (Belz, 2005; Strobl, 2019), with no study available that gives a quantitive overview of L2 German coreference use, focussing, amongst others, on reference types or coreferential relations.
Our study aims to fill this gap by furthering research into coreference in L2 German writing, focusing on L2 writers with L1 Dutch. The analysis is based on the Belgisches Deutschkorpus (Beldeko) (Strobl & Wedig, 2023). Beldeko consists of 301 summaries written by advanced students of L2 German in an academic writing course. The corpus has been pre-processed and automatically annotated with part-of-speech tags and lemmas. Coreference was manually annotated with the help of a newly developed annotation system that combines categories of different frameworks (e.g., Becher, 2011; Kunz, 2010; Reznicek, 2013), such as antecedent types, coreferential expression, degree of coreference explicitness, and coreferential relations. This exhaustive annotation system also facilitates the calculation of the length of coreference chains.
The analysis of the corpus via the statistical software R revealed pronouns to be the most used type of reference (34%), closely followed by repetitions of proper nouns (31%). Demonstrative pronouns were used less often. Most coreferential relations were anaphoric, with nearly no cataphoric relation found in the corpus. Additionally, most coreferential relations were inter-sentential. The average coreferential chain consisted of 3.2 elements. We will present the results of this first analysis of coreference use in L2 German written by L1 Dutch students, comparing them with coreference patterns in L1 and translated German (e.g., Kunz et al., 2021) and discussing potential influences of the students´ L1.
References
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