COMOLA: Computer-Aided Syntactic Analysis of Interlanguage Data in Two Stages
G.J. Hakkenberg, P.A.J.M. Coppen, Theo Bongaerts, M.M. Jagtman · 1995
this paper we would like to present the two-stage model of COMOLA, an acronym for COmputer MOdel for Language Acquisition. This two-stage model is presently being developed in a follow-up of a research program initiated at the University of Nijmegen in 1988. The research carried out thus far has resulted in a computer system called COMOLA, which was specifically designed for the syntactic analysis of L2 production data and which has been succesfully applied to the analysis of L2 Dutch data. Both COMOLA and the analyses carried out with the system are most fully described in Jagtman (1994). In this paper we will refer to this version of COMOLA as the one-stage model. However, this one-stage model has certain drawbacks with respect to the amount of data it can handle and the depth and detail of the analyses. To overcome these limitations a follow-up project was set up. In this paper we will report on the development of a new version of COMOLA, which will be referred to as the two-stage model. The organization of this paper will be as follows. Section 1 discusses some basic issues about COMOLA and presents the layout of the system, focusing on the differences between the one-stage and the two-stage model. In section 2 the limitations of the one-stage model are clarified. In section 3 we will show how reference to motion and location are dealt with in the two-stage model. In section 4 we will illustrate how this is done using the preposition naar (to) as an example. And finally, in section 5 we will make some concluding remarks. 1 COMOLA: A tool for the description of interlanguage