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ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Swedish word family resource

Construction, applicability, strengths and first experiments

ORCID logo | University of Gothenburg
| University of Gothenburg
| University of Helsinki

The article introduces a novel lexical resource for Swedish based on word family principles. The development of the Swedish Word Family (SweWF) resource is set into the context of linguistic complexity in second language acquisition. The SweWF is particularly appropriate for that, given that it contains lexical items used in second language corpora, namely, in a corpus of coursebook texts, and in a corpus of learner essays. The main focus of the article is on the construction of the resource with its user interface and on its applicability for research, although it also opens vast possibilities for practical applications for language learning, testing and assessment. We demonstrate the value of the resource through several case studies.

Keywords: word family resources, linguistic complexity, graded lexical resources, Swedish as a second language, word formation morphology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Related research
  • 3.Constructing the Swedish Word Family resource
    • 3.1Swedish morphology – a short introduction
    • 3.2Morphological complexity in a CAF context
    • 3.3CoDeRooMor resource
    • 3.4The Swedish Word Family user interface
    • 3.5Limitations and discussion
      • 1.Polysemy within word families
      • 2.Hierarchy within word families
      • 3.Replicability
      • 4.Manual versus automatic approaches to morphological analysis
  • 4.Hypotheses and case studies
    • 4.1Hypothesis 1: Distribution of singleton families over levels
    • 4.2Hypothesis 2: Morphological complexity within a family
    • 4.3Hypothesis 3: Extralinguistic insights through word families
  • 5.Conclusions and future work
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 26 February 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/itl.22026.vol
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