Potential Perspectives Corpus Linguistics Offers for Applied Linguistics Studies: The Use of BNC to Increase Validity

Year 2017, Volume: 3 Issue: 1, 32 - 46, 05.09.2017

Cihat Atar

Abstract

This paper studies how corpora can be incorporated
into a study in Applied Linguistics field to increase validity. This study aims
at testing the validity of a previous study (Atar, 2014) which focused on the
reverse transfer from English to Turkish of Turkish bilingual speakers of English.
In that study (Atar, 2014) the processing of predictive conditionals
(conditionals which require a real possibility) by monolingual and bilingual
Turkish speakers are contrasted and it was hypothesized that the bilinguals would
use future tenses in their Turkish predictive conditionals (as a result of
reverse transfer from English) which is an ungrammatical structure in Turkish.
However, one flaw of this study was that the hypothesis took it for granted
that English always has future tenses (or modals) in predictive conditionals
(please see Atar, 2014 for details). This is an important issue, because if
English already uses present tenses in predictive conditionals, the research cannot
claim that Turkish bilinguals use future tenses in their Turkish predictive conditionals
as a result of the reverse transfer. Consequently, this study sets out to make the
description of English predictive conditionals from the British National Corpus
(the BNC) to put the claims of this research on a reliable base and this has
implications for the use of Corpus Linguistics in Applied Linguistics studies.

Keywords

Corpus linguistics, predictive conditionals, English conditionals

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