Language Family Relationship Preserved in Non-native English

Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 1940–1949, Dublin, Ireland, August 23-29 2014. Language Family Relationship Preserved in Non-native English Ryo Nagata Konan University 8-9-1 Okamoto, Higashinada, Kobe, Hyogo 658-8501, Japan nagata-coling@hyogo-u.ac.jp Abstract Mother tongue interference is the phenomenon where linguistic systems of a mother tongue are transferred to another language. Recently, Nagata and Whittaker (2013) have shown that language family relationship among mother tongues is preserved in English written by Indo- European language speakers because of mother tongue interference. At the same time, their findings further introduce the following two research questions: (1) Does the preservation uni- versally hold in non-native English other than in English of Indo-European language speakers? (2) Is the preservation independent of proficiency in English? In this paper, we address these research questions. We first explore the two research questions empirically by reconstructing language family trees from English texts written by speakers of Asian languages. We then dis- cuss theoretical reasons for the empirical results. We finally introduce another hypothesis called the existence of a probabilistic module to explain why the preservation does or does not hold in particular situations. 1 Introduction Transfer of linguistic systems of a mother tongue to another language, namely mother tongue interfer- ence, is often observable in the writing of non-native speakers. The reader may be able to determine the mother tongue of the writer of the following sentence from the underlined article error: The alien wouldn’t use my spaceship but the hers. The answer would probably be French or Spanish; the defi- nite article is allowed to modify possessive pronouns in these languages, and the usage is sometimes negatively transferred to English writing. Researchers in corpus linguistics including Swan and Smith (2001), Aarts and Granger (1998), and Altenberg and Tapper (1998) have been working on mother tongue interference to reveal overused/underused words, part of speech (POS), or grammatical items. Recently, Nagata and Whittaker (2013) have shown that language family relationship between mother tongues is preserved in English written by Indo-European language speakers; because of the preservation, one can reconstruct a lan- guage family tree similar to the canonical Indo-European family tree (Beekes, 2011; Ramat and Ramat, 2006) from their English writings. They have further revealed factors contributing to the preservation of the language family relationship, which they show is useful for related natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as grammatical error detection/correction and native language identification (Wong and Dras, 2009). At the same time, their findings further introduce the following two research questions: (1) Does the preservation universally hold in non-native English? (2) Is the preservation independent of proficiency in English? The results (Nagata and Whittaker, 2013) for English written by Indo-European language speakers suggest that the answer to question (1) is yes. Based on this, we hypothesize that: Hypothesis I: The preservation of language family relationship universally holds in non-native English. This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Page numbers and proceedings footer are added by …

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