Romanica Olomucensia 2023, 35(1):23-40 | DOI: 10.5507/ro.2023.003

Etiquetaje de expresiones multipalabra en ensayos escritos por nativos y no nativos de español en un curso de desarrollo de gramática y composición

Miguel Da Corte, Jorge Baptista
Universidade do Algarve, Portugal
INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal

La literatura sobre el aprendizaje de una segunda lengua postula que existen diferencias significativas entre el uso de expresiones multipalabra (EMP) por parte de hablantes nativos (HN) y no nativos (HNN). Además, considera que los niveles de competencia lingüística pueden estimarse a partir del uso de dichas expresiones. En este trabajo se analiza la producción escrita de un corpus de ensayos escritos por hablantes nativos (16 ensayos, 5.839 palabras) y no nativos de español (25 ensayos, 7.767 palabras) matriculados en un curso centrado en el desarrollo de las habilidades ortográficas, gramaticales, léxicas, semánticas y discursivas en español. Este es un curso de matriculación obligatoria para los estudiantes que aspiran a obtener el título de traductor o intérprete (español/inglés) en el centro educativo donde se realizó el estudio. Dos expertos lingüistas etiquetaron de forma manual el corpus del estudio. El esquema de clasificación utilizado se inspiró en otros esquemas encontrados en la literatura y construido con fines similares. Los resultados mostraron que no se encontraron mayores diferencias (correlación de Pearson: 0,894) en la distribución de los tipos de EMP en el análisis del corpus de HN y HNN. Sin embargo, se observaron diferencias interesantes en algunas categorías, concretamente entre las expresiones fraseológicas verbales y los sustantivos comunes compuestos. Aunque el corpus es pequeño para llegar a conclusiones más relevantes, cabe destacar que los diferentes tipos de EMP se distribuyen de forma desigual en los textos escritos por los hablantes nativos y no nativos y que algunas categorías son un indicador más claro de un nivel de competencia más cercano al nivel de dominio del idioma materno.

Palabras clave: expresiones multipalabra; competencia lingüística; nivel de clasificación; modelos de aprendizaje automático; cursos para el desarrollo de habilidades (en español)

Multiword expression tagging of Spanish native and non-native speakers' written essays in a grammar and composition developmental course

The literature on second language learning posits that there are significant differences between the use of multiword expressions (MWE) by native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS). Furthermore, it considers that levels of language proficiency can be estimated on the basis of the use of these expressions. This paper analyses the written production from a corpus of essays written by native (16 essays, 5839 words) and non-native Spanish speakers (25 essays, 7767 words) enrolled in a course focused on the development of orthographic, grammatical, lexical, semantic, and discursive skills in Spanish. This is a required course for students pursuing a certification in Translating or Interpreting (Spanish/English) in the educational setting where the study took place. The corpus was manually tagged by two linguists. The classification scheme used was inspired by other schemes found in the literature and built for similar purposes. The results show that, in general, the distribution of MWE types found in the NS and NNS partition of the corpus was not very different (Pearson correlation: 0.894). However, interesting differences were found between the categories of verbal idioms and noun constructions. Though the corpus is too small for more significant conclusions to be drawn, it is possible to point out that different types of MWE are unevenly distributed among the native speakers' and non-native learners' written production material, and some categories may be a clearer indicator of near-native-speaker proficiency.

Keywords: multiword expressions; language proficiency; classification level; machine- learning models; developmental education courses (in Spanish)

Received: November 12, 2022; Revised: November 12, 2022; Accepted: May 1, 2023; Published: July 26, 2023  Show citation

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Da Corte M, Baptista J. Multiword expression tagging of Spanish native and non-native speakers' written essays in a grammar and composition developmental course. Romanica Olomucensia. 2023;35(1):23-40. doi: 10.5507/ro.2023.003.
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