Pontianak, 15 January 2015

ASSIGNMENT : GRAMMAR FOR EFL TEACHER

A Critical Review
Name
Student Number
Class
Journal Publisher and Year
The Title and Writer

Pages

: HAMID DARMADI
: F2201141022
:B
: Sciencedirect/Elsevier (2013)
: A Statistical Study of the Usage of No-Negation and
Not-Negation in Spoken Academic English by Carlos
Herrero-Zorita
: 482 489

A Critical Review of Zorita, C. H. 2013. A Statistical Study of the Usage of No-Negation and
Not-Negation in Spoken Academic English. A social and Behavioral Sciences Research
Journal, Vol.95, p.482-489
Introduction
Using Bibers et al (1999) Totties (1991) theories, Zorita (2013) conducted a study on
the frequency of usage of no-negation and not-negation between spoken and written
discourse. This research aimed to compare the frequency of usage of these types of negation
between spoken and written discourse, to observe if not-negation is more frequent than nonegation in the type of spoken discourse and to reproduce the Bibers theory in LGSWE in a
context for academic spoken purpose. The study reveals that the negation in the spoken
discourse is much more than in the written discourse and there is a contradiction of the writer
hypothesis about frequent usage between not-negation and no-negation (BASE corpus).
However the result only for five pairs of negative construction proposed by Tottie (see Table
1) which cannot over generalize the assumption of the writer itself for all ten forms of
negation construction for more solid conclusion of the research. Otherwise, to provide the
quantitative research, the writer had a strong argument and accurate by the usage of Sketch
Engine which introduce by Kilgarriff et al. (2004) to collect the data, measured by particular
software called Prism 5.04. and apply Mann-Whitney U test to measure the significant results
of the findings which is valid. To the extent that this research is comparative, results of this
study state several steps to reach it in a procedural way which can be seen and explain by the
tables and graphs. This research showed some new practical usage in comparative way. This

study will also help other further researcher to get different learning result in English
grammar for each English knowledge and skills (writing, reading, speaking, and listening).
In summary, the current study is not being conclusive yet. Further studies must be
continued by other researcher. This study was supported by other expert voice in the same
field mostly by Biber et al (1999) in Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English,
Tottie (1991) in Negation in English Speech and Writing. A study in Variation. Biber state
that in spoken discourse, negation is much more frequent than in written discourse
(1999:159). He also concludes that not-negation is much more frequent in the context of
conversation, fiction writing, news writing and academic prose. The research would consist
on two sections after select five pairs of negation instruction. At first, the researcher will
observe between BASE (British Academic Spoken English) and BAWE (British Academic
Written English) corpora and finally took BASE corpus for the focus study of negation.
BASE contains 1,644,942 tokens in total between lectures and seminars, while BAWE
contain 8,336,262 tokens of students writing. The researcher use Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et
al, 2004) to collect the data. The following instruction were used: (1) extracted the
frequencies of each negative construction, (2) adding up the total relative frequencies and
separate them into no-negation instances and not-negation constructions (both BASE and
BAWE), and (3) repeating the same process in the BAWE corpus and compared the results.
The result was the number of negative constructions in BASE corpus higher than in BAWE
corpus. Then the researcher only took BASE for further relative frequencies in each
documents and organized the data in two column by using Prism 5.0 4 and representing the
data by using tables and graphs (see table 3 and figure 1). In the discussion Table 4 and
Figure 2, we can see the result of frequency extraction and normality test. The researcher also
confirm the distribution of no-negation and not-negation, although both have a similar
distribution, the number of occurences is higher in no-negation than in not-negation
(contrastively from Bibers) for spoken academic English. The researcher finally validates the
data by applying Mann-Whitney U test and showing the result.
After reading this great article, rather than stating that this study is a statistical study,
the reviewer would recommend this as a comparative study. The reviewer also recommend
the researcher to obtain how the appearance of processes in no-negation and not-negation by
using sketch engine and also the process graph of standard deviation by using Prism 5.04.

The writing styles of the researcher are well-organized. Overall, this study had been focusing
the research in the negation scope which is really hard to generate. The reviewer can
conclude that this study can be developed widely by other researcher. This study will be
beneficial for the reader and other interests who want to take further studies about negation.
References
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Genske, K.(2013). Negation as a Formal Flexible Feature in childrens grammar. A
Proceeding of ConSOLE XXI, 2013, 88-103
Horn, R. L. (2001). A Natural History of Negation. Chicago : CSLI Publications
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