The Use of English Negation by Spanish Students of English: a Learner Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

[Abstract] This paper is based on a research project by the same author, in which the acquisition of the English negation system is investigated. This is a preliminary account and it is corpus-based. Two learner corpora were used: the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) Spanish subcorpus and the Santiago University Learner of English Corpus (SULEC). The former is a sample corpus –it is finished– and it contains writtenargumentative essays of Spanish speakers. The latter contains both spoken and written data –oral interviews and argumentativetexts– and it is a monitor corpus, new data are continuously beingadded. The Spanish subcorpus of ICLE contains over 125.000words; whereas SULEC contained over 350.000 words at the moment of the research. A native English corpus was also used in order to contrast the learner and the native use of English negation.