  We present ELQA, a corpus of questions and answers in and about the English
language. Collected from two online forums, the >70k questions (from English
learners and others) cover wide-ranging topics including grammar, meaning,
fluency, and etymology. The answers include descriptions of general properties
of English vocabulary and grammar as well as explanations about specific
(correct and incorrect) usage examples. Unlike most NLP datasets, this corpus
is metalinguistic -- it consists of language about language. As such, it can
facilitate investigations of the metalinguistic capabilities of NLU models, as
well as educational applications in the language learning domain. To study
this, we define a free-form question answering task on our dataset and conduct
evaluations on multiple LLMs (Large Language Models) to analyze their capacity
to generate metalinguistic answers.
