Lexical richness in Lithuanian beginner learners’ spoken and written language: a focus on production

ABSTRACT

The present research explores the productive vocabulary that beginner learners of Lithuanian as a foreign language use when speaking and writing. This study is based on the newly developed Lithuanian Learner Corpus (LLC) and uses its subcorpus of beginner texts (103,148 tokens). It measures lexical richness in Lithuanian learner language (LLL) by examining lexical variation, distribution of lexical word classes, lexical errors, and formulaic language in spoken and written language. The results show that beginner learners of Lithuanian use minimal lexical resources, and lexis used for pragmatic purposes is scarcely employed in either mode.

KEYWORDS:

• Learner corpus
• spoken language
• written language
• Lithuanian as a foreign language
• language production

Acknowledgments

The Lithuanian Learner Corpus (LLC) was compiled in 2017–2019 within the framework of the project “Lithuanian Academic Scheme for International Cooperation in Baltic Studies” (No. 09.3.1-ESFA-V-709-01-0002).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Lithuanian Learner Corpus (2022) at: https://kalbu.vdu.lt/en/resources/lithuanian-learner-corpus/.

Notes

1. Here and elsewhere data representing native-speaker Lithuanian is obtained from the wordlist of lemmas from the Joint Corpus of Lithuanian (JCL) (Dadurkevičius 2020).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the The ESF Social Innovation Initiative [09.3.1-ESFA-V-709-01-0002].

Notes on contributors

Jūratė Ruzaitė

Jūratė Ruzaitė is a professor of English linguistics at the Department of Foreign Language, Literary and Translation Studies at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, learner language, and (critical) discourse analysis.

Eglė Krivickaitė-Leišienė

Eglė Krivickaitė-Leišienė is a lecturer at the Department of Lithuanian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. Her research interests focus on (child) language acquisition, early bilingualism/multilingualism, and child language disorders.