Detecting Syntactic Substratum Effects Automatically in Interlanguage Corpora

This paper applies techniques to obtain an aggregate measure of syntactic distance between two varieties of English spoken by firstand second-generation Finnish Australians and examines the degree of what we call syntactic ‘contamination’ in the two. Our general goal is to detect the linguistic sources of the variation between the two groups and interpret the findings from (at least) two perspectives, universal vs. contact influence. In our reading, the notion of “universal” is concerned, not with hypotheses about Chomskyan universals and their applicability to second language acquisition (SLA) or with hypotheses about potential processing constraints in any detail, but rather with more general properties of the language faculty and natural tendencies in the grammar, termed ‘vernacular primitives’ by Chambers (2003). To explain differential usage by the two groups, we also draw upon the strategies and processes that L2 learners usually evince in their interlanguage regardless of their L1 (Ellis 1994). Because of the limited scope of the paper, we can only examine, in detail, potential contact-induced effects of Finnish on the English of Finnish Australians.