On the teachability of nominal compounds to Spanish leaners of English for Specific Purposes (original) (raw)
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This study aims to investigate Greek-English interlanguage compounds like *toys factory or *shoes exporters attested in observational data. Research indicates that, generally, non-head nouns (henceforth NHNs) in English compounds do not take the regular plural affix -s. elicited novel deverbal compounds from L1 English children and showed that although they produce irregular NHNs, they overwhelmingly reduce their regular counterparts. He suggested that this asymmetry can be accounted for by model of level ordering in lexical phonology according to which, irregular plurals are stored in the lexicon at level I, compound formation rules apply at level II, and regular plurals are formed by application of a rule at level III. Consequently it is assumed that irregular plurals can be inserted in compounds because the latter are formed at a next level, unlike regular plurals which cannot, because they are formed at a level following that of compounds. in a longitudinal study of L1 German impaired (dysphasic) and non-impaired children, show that regular German plural affixes are consistently omitted inside compounds and advocate a level-ordering principle for German, too, thus offering further support to Gordon's claim. In addition, Clahsen (1995) discusses the acquisition of German plural suffixes by Portuguese, Spanish and Italian immigrants and concludes that those German plural suffixes perceived as regular (-s or -n, depending on the subjects' L1) are left out in compounds.
The comprehension of English compound nouns by Arabic-speaking EFL learners
2023
It explores the problems that these learners may encounter in understanding certain types of compounds, namely, subordinative, attributive and coordinative, based on the notions of endocentricity and exocentricity. Participants whose English proficiency level was advanced took a test to identify the meaning of an underlined compound, without using a dictionary. The responses to the three different types of compounds were analyzed using Two-Way repeated measures ANOVA. The results showed that the differences between endocentric and exocentric subordinative compounds were statistically significant in favor of the former. We argue that endocentric, especially subordinative endocentric compounds, were more easily understood due to their semantic transparency, i.e., the entire compound is a hyponym of its head, and to the similarity of this type of compound in the participants' first language. The study provides some pedagogical implications for teaching compound nouns to EFL learners.
Crosslinguistic influences in the acquisition of Spanish L3
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This paper reports on learning experiments designed to explore the learnability of compounds by foreign language learners. The results indicate that the learnability of compounds seems to be influenced by cross-linguistic differences between L1 and L2, including morphological structure, semantic equivalence of constituents, transparency, and congruence or incongruence between metaphorical motivation. It may also be influenced by previous knowledge of the meanings of constituents, frequency and some other factors. The compounds that seem easiest to learn tend to be parallel in morphological structure with the L1 item, transparent, descriptive, nonmetaphorical, and tend to belong to a productive pattern. Learnability depends both on cross-linguistic differences and universal principles of lexical acquisition.
ELOPE, 2021
Variation in the Translation Patterns of English 'Noun + Noun' Compounds in ESP: The Case of Engineering Students ABSTRACT 'Noun + Noun' compounds are among the most common and productive structures in modern English. Due to their complexity and potential ambiguity, they represent a challenge for English language learners, especially if such compounds are generally untypical and unproductive in the learners' mother tongue, as the case is with the Serbian. The aim of this research is to examine how engineering students understand and translate 'N+N' structures in the context of English for Specific Purposes, focusing on binominal compounds and compounds with more than two constituents. The research method is the analysis of a translation test from English to Serbian. The results show that students need to receive more input about the semantic and syntactic properties of these structures and develop learning strategies that would help them to fully comprehend this type of compounds and provide their correct translations, focusing on their meaning instead of form.
English and Indonesian Nominalization: A Case of Word Classes
International Journal of Education Research and Development
This research aims at determining the similarities, dissimilarities, and possible learning difficulties faced by students learning English and Indonesian nominalization as well as the recommendations to TEFL. The qualitative research design was applied. The documentation technique was used to collect the data. To analyze the data, the researchers used a descriptive analysis. The results showed that there were three similarities and four the dissimilarities between English and Indonesian nominalization found. The three similarities were in suffixation, demonstrative pronominal and conversion. While, the four dissimilarities were in affixation, Adjective reduplication, conversion and To-infinitive. The possible learning difficulties faced by students learning English and Indonesian nominalization was suffixation and confixation which were not very familiar with them. The recommendations of this research was as a fundamental teaching guidance in helping English teachers design a better...
Morphological awareness in German as a foreign language: the case of adjective + noun compounds
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Morphology often plays a tangential role in foreign language classes, and recent studies suggest that Morphological Awareness can be very helpful when it comes to learning a language. In this context, the purpose of this study is to examine the compounding skills of learners of German as a foreign language. Since noun compounds are a very productive phenomenon in German, adjective+noun compounds, which have not received a lot of attention so far, were used for this study. A compounding production task was issued to thirty-four participants who were native speakers of Spanish and/or Catalan and had an A2 to B1 level in German. Later, an error analysis was used in order to assess the data. Results indicated that the participants exhibited a high level of Morphological Awareness. They performed mostly well on the morphological part but had greater difficulties with semantic aspects.
When teaching works and time helps: Noun modification in L2 English school children
Open Linguistics
The study focuses on the interaction between length of exposure and instruction in the L2 English acquisition process of L1 Spanish school children. Two target structures involving noun premodification are targeted: noun–noun (NN) compounds and adjective–noun (AN) strings. Four groups of participants have been studied for 3 years: a group that has been exposed to a specifically designed teaching program targeting NN compounds and a group that has received the regular English instruction program which does not address this structure as part of the curriculum. Two age subgroups appear in each case. The longitudinal judgment data elicited show that performance improves in the cooperation between length of exposure and the exposure to the NN instruction program. Furthermore, it is this last issue that actually takes the lead in that the NN instruction program directly impacts on not only NN compounds but also AN strings. This points to instruction being determinant in the L2 learning pr...
On the aspect of deverbal nominals: a corpus study of perception nominalizations in Spanish
Les nominalisations ont essentiellement été analysées d'un point de vue théorique, de sorte que des études de corpus élaborées sont difficiles à trouver. En outre, à l'exception d'un intérêt récent pour les substantifs psychologiques, la littérature s'est généralement concentrée sur les cas prototypiques, à savoir les nominalisations déverbales dérivées de verbes ayant un sujet agentif (comme construction, traduction). Cet article comble ces lacunes en étudiant le comportement aspectuel d'une catégorie négligée, les nominalisations de perception en espagnol (p.ex. vista, mirada, escucha). Afin de montrer que la complexité aspectuelle de ces nominalisations est comparable à l'hétérogénéité de la catégorie apparentée des verbes de perception, des données de corpus de nature différente seront utilisées.
Another look at nominal compounds
Proceedings of the 22nd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics -, 1984
We present a progress report on our research on nominal compounds (NC's). Recent approaches to this probiem in linguistics and natural ianguage processing (NLP) are reviewed and criticized. We argue that the notion of "roie nominal", which is at the interface of linguistic and extraiinguistic knowledge, is crucial for characterizing NC'e as weII as other Iinguistic phenomena. We examine a number of constraints on the semantic interpretation ruies for NC's. Proposals are made that shouid improve the capability of NLP systems to deaI with NC's.