Reconstructing an Indo-European Family Tree from Non-native English Texts

Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1137–1147, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9 2013. c⃝2013 Association for Computational Linguistics Reconstructing an Indo-European Family Tree from Non-native English texts Ryo Nagata1,2 Edward Whittaker3 1Konan University / Kobe, Japan 2LIMSI-CNRS / Orsay, France 3Inferret Limited / Northampton, England nagata-acl@hyogo-u.ac.jp, ed@inferret.co.uk Abstract Mother tongue interference is the phe- nomenon where linguistic systems of a mother tongue are transferred to another language. Although there has been plenty of work on mother tongue interference, very little is known about how strongly it is transferred to another language and about what relation there is across mother tongues. To address these questions, this paper explores and visualizes mother tongue interference preserved in English texts written by Indo-European language speakers. This paper further explores lin- guistic features that explain why certain relations are preserved in English writing, and which contribute to related tasks such as native language identification. 1 Introduction Transfer of linguistic systems of a mother tongue to another language, namely mother tongue inter- ference, is often observable in the writing of non- native speakers. The reader may be able to deter- mine the mother tongue of the writer of the fol- lowing sentence from the underlined article error: The alien wouldn’t use my spaceship but the hers. The answer would probably be French or Span- ish; the definite article is allowed to modify pos- sessive pronouns in these languages, and the us- age is sometimes negatively transferred to English writing. Researchers such as Swan and Smith (2001), Aarts and Granger (1998), Davidsen- Nielsen and Harder (2001), and Altenberg and Tapper (1998) work on mother tongue interfer- ence to reveal overused/underused words, part of speech (POS), or grammatical items. In contrast, very little is known about how strongly mother tongue interference is transferred to another language and about what relation there is across mother tongues. At one extreme, one could argue that it is so strongly transferred to texts in another language that the linguistic rela- tions between mother tongues are perfectly pre- served in the texts. At the other extreme, one can counter it, arguing that other features such as non-nativeness are more influential than mother tongue interference. One possible reason for this is that a large part of the distinctive language sys- tems of a mother tongue may be eliminated when transferred to another language from a speaker’s mother tongue. For example, Slavic languages have a rich inflectional case system (e.g., Czech has seven inflectional cases) whereas French does not. However, the difference in the richness cannot be transferred into English because English has al- most no inflectional case system. Thus, one can- not determine the mother tongue of a given non- native text from the inflectional case. A similar argument can be made about some parts of gen- der, tense, and aspect systems. Besides, Wong and Dras (2009) show that there are no significant dif- ferences, between mother tongues, in the misuse of certain syntactic features such as subject-verb …

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