THE CPDB: A LEARNING AND TEACHING CORPUS-BASED METHODOLOGICAL TOOL

The use of both corpus-based methodological tools and computer technologies (NTICs) has recently become a commonplace in the teaching and learning of second and foreign languages (Granger 2003, Sinclair 2004, Bernardini 2004, Conrad 2005, Laso & Giménez 2007, Granger & Meunier 2008, Aijmer 2009, Comelles et al. 2010, Bennet 2010, MacDonald et al. 2011), as they allow the language learner, as a language observer, to become aware of the many complexities of real language in use. Similarly, corpus linguistics has also contributed to underlining the close relationship between lexis and grammar, since clause patterns depend on the presence of specific lexical verbs.

As part of a teaching innovation project (2011/PID-UB37), the Grup de Recerca en Lexicologia i Lingüística de Corpus group (GReLiC) at the University of Barcelona has recently developed a database of English clause patterns: the Clause Pattern Database (CPDB), which has been implemented in the undergraduate course Descriptive Grammar of English II (DGE II) in the degree of English Studies. Such a methodological tool provides a) a wide representative sample of the valency and clause patterns of a selection of 217 lexical verbs extracted from a self-compiled corpus on mystery novels, and b) a tree diagram for each example in the database. Tree diagrams have been created with the assistance of the Charniak parser (Charniak and Johnson 2005) and the PhpSyntax Tree generator (http://www.ironcreek.net/phpsyntaxtree/). The output of the resulting tree diagrams has been manually associated with each of the entries in the database.

The information displayed in the CPDB provides a thorough analysis of several lexico-grammatical phenomena dealt with in the DGE classroom, such as ergative, dative and passive alternations as well as lexical and structural ambiguity. Among the attested pedagogical benefits of the CPDB (Comelles et al. 2012), it is worth noting that a) it provides users with authentic language, as examples are corpus-based, b) it triggers class discussions on the analysis of language behaviour and thus provides a framework for critical reflection and collaborative learning on the intricacies that the analysis of corpus data usually involves, and c) it promotes the use of new technologies in the linguistics classroom.

This poster shows the lexico-grammatical information provided in the CPDB as well as some of the possible pedagogical applications of the CPDB in the linguistics classroom at university level.