ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how language learner corpora can offer insights into discourse development across different instructional levels by analyzing the linguistic associations learners make with different second-language (L2) written academic discourses while acquiring the Spanish subjunctive. The subjunctive, a polysemic functional morpheme, plays a central role in the Spanish foreign-language curriculum. The Spanish subjunctive is a polysemic inflectional morpheme whose connotation depends on the type of clause where it appears and the speaker’s/writer’s pragmatic goals. Throughout the course of L2 development, learners of Spanish unreliably produce the subjunctive where lexical and syntactic prescriptive rules dictate, probably because learners are slow to develop abilities to generate complex syntax and inter-clausal relationships. Corpus linguistic tools and techniques can identify the functions that both native speakers and L2 learners assign lexical and grammatical phenomena.
