ICLE-RC is a corpus of learner English texts annotated for relative clauses (RCs) and related phenomena (it-clefts, pseudo-clefts, existential relatives, etc.), which we call other constructions (OCs). The corpus builds on a subset of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE; Granger et al., 2020). The ICLE is a corpus of academic essays written by undergraduate students, who are intermediate or advanced learners of English, coming from different L1 backgrounds. The first version of the ICLE-RC contains 144 ICLE texts (100K+ words), covering six L1 backgrounds – Finnish, Italian, Polish, Swedish, Turkish, and Urdu – with 24 texts from each. These texts are annotated for over 900 RCs and 400 OCs with respect to a wide array of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse features.

The ICLE-RC is designed to serve as a valuable resource for research on RCs in various areas of linguistic analysis. In SLA and language typology, the corpus would help identifying varying patterns in the use of English RCs by L2 learners, and checking whether those patterns result from specific L1 backgrounds. The ICLE-RC can also be used to (re-)examine the properties of RCs in regional varieties of English, and validate or revise the resulting findings against the existing research in World Englishes. Furthermore, the corpus offers a rich repository of information-structuring devices (OCs, in addition to RCs), and this would aid research on discourse structure, supporting the analysis of fore-/back-grounding strategies, discourse referents, discourse segments, and discourse relations.

The ICLE-RC is now in the post-production stage, and will soon be published as an open-access resource.

References:
Granger, S., Dupont, M., Meunier, F., Naets, H., & Paquot, M. (2020). The International Corpus of Learner English, Version 3. https://www.uclouvain.be/en/research-institutes/ilc/cecl/icle.