Alternation phenomena and language proficiency: the genitive alternation in the spoken language of EFL learners

Abstract This study investigates how foreign language proficiency, which previous corpus-based research on alternation phenomena has largely ignored, influences the choice of genitive variant (the tail of the dog/the dog’s tail) in learners of English as a Foreign Language. The data stems from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus, a three-million-word corpus featuring spoken language from low-intermediate to advanced learners of English from several L1 backgrounds. The collected genitive observations were annotated for various constraints such as the length, animacy, definiteness and discourse status of the constituents and then analyzed via mixed-effects logistic regression. The results show that although native speakers and learners are remarkably similar, low-proficiency learners are less sensitive to possessor definiteness and possessor animacy, the latter of which is otherwise the strongest constraint of the genitive alternation.