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There have been some suggestions in linguistics and cognitive science that humans process continuous speech by routinely chunking it up into smaller units. The nature of the process is open to debate, which is complicated by the apparent existence of two entirely different chunking processes, both of which seem to be warranted by the limitations of working memory. To overcome them, humans seem to both combine items into larger units for future retrieval (usage-based chunking), and partition incoming streams into temporal groups (perceptual chunking). To determine linguistic properties and cognitive constraints of perceptual chunking, most previous research has employed short-constructed stimuli modeled on written language. In contrast, we presented linguistically naïve listeners with excerpts of natural speech from corpora and collected their intuitive perceptions of chunk boundaries. We then used mixed-effects logistic regression models to find out to what extent pauses, prosody, syntax, chunk duration, and surprisal predict chunk boundary perception. The results showed that all cues were important, suggesting cue degeneracy, but with substantial variation across listeners and speech excerpts. Chunk duration had a strong effect, supporting the cognitive constraint hypothesis. The direction of the surprisal effect supported the distinction between perceptual and usage-based chunking.

Why are we so afraid of making mistakes? Students in language classes, speakers of non-standard varieties, professionals working abroad – we all share the anxiety of dropping the ball. But where does this anxiety come from? Why do we perceive certain linguistic features as errors in the first place? Is there any inherent faultiness in such features, or is a language error arbitrary? And if it is arbitrary, are errors less real? In this discussion, Maria Khachaturyan, Maria Kuteeva and Svetlana Vetchinnikova zoom in on the social life of variation in language and its uneasy relationship with our normative ideas. After that, Gunnar Norrman and Dmitri Leontjev give their comments. The discussion closes with replies by the first three authors.

Human perception relies on chunking up an incoming information stream into smaller units to make sense of it. Evidence of chunking has been found across different domains, including visual events, music, and dance movement. It is largely uncontested that language processing must also proceed in smaller chunks of some kind. What these online chunks consist in is much less understood. In this paper, we propose that cognitively relevant chunks can be identified by crowdsourcing listener perceptions of chunk boundaries in real-time speech, even if the listeners are non-native speakers of the language. We present a paradigm in which experiment participants simultaneously listen to short extracts of authentic speech and mark chunk boundaries using a custom-built tablet application. We then test the internal validity of the method by measuring the extent to which fluent L2 listeners agree on chunk boundaries. To do this, we use three datasets collected within the paradigm and a suite of different statistical methods. The external validity of the method is studied in a separate paper and is briefly discussed at the end.

English as a lingua franca (ELF) has become ubiquitous in today's globalised, mobile and fast-changing world. It is clear that it will have an unprecedented impact not only on how we communicate but also on our understanding of language use and change. What exactly ELF brings to our life and to language theory is a question which requires an interdisciplinary take. This book gathers together leading scholars from world Englishes, typology, language history, cognitive linguistics, translation studies, multilingualism, sociolinguistics and ELF research itself to seek state-of-the-art answers. Chapters present original insights on language change, based on theoretical approaches and empirical studies, and provide clear examples of social, interactional and cognitive changes that ELF instigates. The picture which unfolds on the pages of this book is complex, dynamic and makes a convincing case for the importance of English as a lingua franca on language change at a global scale.

In this chapter we attempt to separate the communal and the individual level of language representation and explore how linguistic regularities emerge at each of them. We sample one communal and ten individual corpora of language use from the same ELF environment and examine to what extent syntactic structure, priming and chunking influence linguistic choice in each corpus by looking at the variation between contracted and full forms (it is/it’s). We find clear differences in how these three factors work across the corpora and attempt to interpret them in relation to the properties of individual languages, language change and the role of ELF.

This paper sets as its aim to show that ELF research is not uniform in its fundamental theoretical assumptions. While one wing of ELF scholars follows a classical Saussurean tradition with its notions oflangueandparole, the other is distinctly usage-based. This is not presented as a problem but rather as a matter to be taken into consideration because the views are not easily reconcilable, if at all. Naturally, this divergence of view is clearly visible in data analysis and leads to different interpretations of the underlying processes. I will illustrate my point by the case of phraseological patterning. It is well-known that multi-word units occurring in ELF use are not quite the same as in standard varieties. In SLA the discrepancies are traditionally labelled as errors, a stance ELF researchers do not generally agree with since the conflicting usages do not seem to lose their communicative successfulness. The question at which ELF researchers look differently is whether not quite nativelike phraseological patterning in ELF is a result of analytic or holistic – although fuzzy – processing, in other words, creation or approximation. The answer to this question has profound implications for our understanding of second language processing.

This paper presents a specific take on the relationship between the global and the local in language. In particular, it draws a distinction between the cognitive and the communal plane of language representation and attempts to model the relationship between the two using complexity theory. To operationalise this relationship and examine it with corpus linguistic methods, it proposes a concept of a cognitive corpus, setting it against the more usual idea of a corpus as representing the language of a certain community of speakers. As a case study, the paper compares the properties of chunking at the cognitive and communal planes. The study shows that (1) chunks at the cognitive plane seem to be more fixed than at the communal, (2) their patterning at the communal plane can be seen as emergent from the patterning observable in individual languages, but that (3) there is also similarity in the shape of the patterning across the two planes. These findings suggest that although the processes leading to multi-word unit patterning are different at each of the planes, the similarity in the shape the patterning takes might be regarded as an indication of the fractal structure of language which is a common property of complex adaptive systems. For example, Zipf’s law, which is able to model the patterning at each of the planes, can be seen as one of the symptoms of such structure. Since the cognitive and the communal planes of language are in constant interaction with each other, such conceptualisation suggests intriguing implications for ongoing change in English and the role second language users might play in it.

Lingua franca interactions are inherently multilingual; speakers’ first and other languages are always implicitly present in such interactions. However, the extent to which speakers resort to their multilingual resources depends on how acceptable and understandable they expect these resources to be with particular interlocutors or within particular speech situations. In this chapter, we draw on the multilingual practices observable in the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA 2008) to generalise to other practices which can be treated as similar from the perspective of perceived acceptability and intelligibility. With this aim in mind, we focus on elements tagged as in the corpus – that is, elements recognised as code-switches by the corpus compilers – and investigate the lexico-grammatical regularities in their co-text. Using both corpus linguistic and micro analytic methods, we show that speakers use these regularities to flag potentially problematic items, including but not limited to code-switches. In this way we extend our scope beyond elements which have traditionally been regarded as multilingual. We expect this research to contribute to the development of corpus linguistic methods in studying elements perceived as “foreign” and thus potentially problematic in the discourse.

This work sets out to examine how second language (L2) users of English acquire, use and process lexical items. For this purpose three types of data were collected from five non-native students of the University of Helsinki. First, each student s drafts of Master s thesis chapters written over a period of time were compiled into a language usage corpus. Second, academic publications a student referred to in her thesis were compiled into a corpus representing her language exposure. Third, several hundreds of words a student used in her thesis were presented to her as stimuli in word association tasks to obtain psycholinguistic data on the representation of the patterns in the mind. Lexical usage patterns, conceived of in accordance with John Sinclair s conceptualisation of lexis and meaning, were then compared to (1) language exposure and (2) word association responses. The results of this triangulation show that, contrary to mainstream thinking in SLA, language production on the idiom principle, i.e. by retrieving holistic patterns glued by syntagmatic association rather than constructing them word by word, is available to L2 users to a much larger degree than is often claimed. More than half of significant multi-word units used by the students also occur in the language they were exposed to. The idiosyncratic multi-word units are often a result of approximation or fixing. Approximation is a process through which a more or less fixed pattern loosens and becomes variable on the semantic or grammatical axis due to frequency effects and the properties of human memory. Fixing, on the other hand, is a reverse process making the wording of the pattern become overly fixed through repeated usage. Neither of the processes damage the meaning communicated in any way. Word association responses also support the main conclusion of the availability of the idiom principle showing that multi-word units used are also represented holistically in the mind and so confirming the continuity between exposure, usage and psycholinguistic representation. Furthermore, they suggest that the model of a unit of meaning developed by Sinclair has psycholinguistic reality as representations of lexical items in the mind seem to mirror the components of a unit of meaning: collocation, colligation and semantic preference. This work offers an in-depth discussion of Sinclair s conceptualisation of meaning and a novel methodology for studying units of meaning in L2 use both quantitatively and qualitatively by triangulating usage, exposure and word association data. It is hoped that the dissertation will be of interest to scholars specialising in second language acquisition and use, English as a lingua franca, phraseological view of language and corpus linguistic methodology. Miksi joskus tuntuu siltä, ettei koskaan pysty puhumaan toista kieltä virheettömästi? Tämä tutkimus osoittaa, että puhujan sanaston rakenteet ja sanojen käyttöprosessit ovat vieraalla kielellä hyvin samankaltaisia kuin äidinkielessä ja kielen muutoksessa. Tarkastelun kohteena on Helsingin yliopiston eri kielitaustaisten opiskelijoiden käyttämä englannin kielen sanasto heidän omissa teksteissään ja sana-assosiaatiotesteissä. Tutkimus soveltaa kielen analyysiin sellaista monisanaisen merkitysyksikön mallia, joka mahdollistaa yksikön sisäisen vaihtelun ja muutoksen havainnoinnin. Tutkimuksessa kehitetyn mallin avulla voi havainnoida sitä, miten merkityksen siirtymä tapahtuu vapaassa sanayhdistelmässä niin, että se kiteytyy uudeksi monisanaiseksi merkitysyksiköksi ja sitä, miten tämä yksikkö jatkaa edelleen vakiintumista ja muuttumista merkitysjatkumoa pitkin jopa idiomiin asti. Merkityksen yksikkö voi myös muuttua taaksepäin ja vakiintumisen sijaan löystyä ilman, että se kuitenkaan täysin hajoaa. Tätä vaihtelua voidaan kognitiivisesti selittää frekvenssivaikutuksella: mitä yleisempi yksikkö on, sitä paremmin meillä on sen tarkka käyttö hallussamme ja kääntäen: mitä harvinaisempi se on, sitä todennäköisempää on, että emme tuota sitä sanatarkasti. Harvinaisemmat yksiköt tuotetaan todennäköisemmin likiarvona eli korvaamalla muutama niiden komponentti abstraktimmalla komponentilla. Ilmauksen vakiintumisilmiö on tuttu kaikille, joilla on kokemusta saman tekstin, esimerkiksi saman luennon tai puheen, esittämistä useampaan kertaan: samat ilmaukset päädytään toistamaan melkein samoin sanoin. Ilmauksen likiarvo on taas kysymyksessä silloin, kun vaikkapa etsitään kirjastosta kirjaa, jonka nimestä on mielessä hieman epätarkka muistikuva: oliko se Looking at the Sun vai Gazing at the Sun , kun itse asiassa se on Staring at the Sun . On perusteltua olettaa, että sama prosessi toimii kun toisen kielen käyttäjä lausuu so to say eikä so to speak , the hen or the egg eikä the chicken or the egg tai to my head eikä to my mind , koska muistamme merkityksen paremmin kuin kielellisen ilmiasun. Siksi toisen kielen käyttö ei enimmäkseen ole virheellistä vaan ainoastaan hieman epämääräisempää, kielen muotojen likiarvoista käyttöä.