Corpora: overuse and underuse of learner English; International English

[Tadeusz Piotrowski]

By accident, I am a Polish user of English (now I am writing
self-consciously, thinking about my own cluster of errors...), and by
accident I know an interesting PhD dissertation that compares selected
aspects of natives-speaker English to those of a non-native variety,
comparing like with like: Przemyslaw Kaszubski Selected aspects of
lexicon, phraseology and style in the writing of Polish advanced
learners of English, a contrastive, corpus-based approach. Poznan 2000
(przemka at elex.amu.edu.pl). He hoped to publish it. But, returning to
errors, if we indeed treat English as an international language, like
Latin, then, first of all, are really native speakers a good yardstick
to measure non-native varieties with? Were there any native speakers of
Latin in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance? Measured against the
numbers of non-native speakers of English, the native ones are a
minority. And one venerated tradition in linguistics is -- what
everybody, the majority, says is correct.
It might be interesting to know what the overlap between different
non-native varieties is, what the common core is. There must be,
otherwise all those speakers could not communicate. That common core is
perhaps the international variety. The international variety was very
broadly described by Quirk and Gimson in their respective publications.
I don't know whether somebody followed up.
Another problem is, what is an error? As far as I know, an error is what
departs from the norm, and the crucial point is to describe the norm. If
we treat the international variety as the norm, then the native-speaker
variety may be said to be a particular cluster of errors. Tadeusz
Piotrowski

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no
> [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On Behalf Of yorick wilks
> Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 3:33 PM
> To: Eric Atwell; xiaotian guo
> Cc: corpora at hd.uib.no; E S Atwell
> Subject: Re: Corpora: overuse and underuse of learner English
>
>
> There are many statistical studies around of the spelling and
> grammatical errors in English associated with specific first
> language competences---e.g. the the English errors Poles
> typically make as contrasted with those of the French (lack
> of articles etc.) These were done so as to produce
> grammar/speeling correctors for particular markets and may
> well be what Eric Attwell was referring to---a search of the
> CL/NLP literature would soon find them.
>
> Whether these studies support the claim of Erics's Polish
> chum, that his cluster of errors now have equal status with
> native English competence is a different and wholly
> non-linguisic question. That there is an international
> English is beyond question as a social fact, and native
> Engish speakers are often poor speakers of it,
> unsurprisingly. The problem of its status will have to be
> settle by its own Academy who will also have to decide which
> particular cluster of distinctive errors will have to have
> primacy over the others in its definition. Yorick Wilks
>
>
> On Wed, 12 Dec 2001 10:19:18 +0000 (GMT), Eric Atwell wrote:
>
> >
> >  >I am making a contrastive study of learner English and NS
> learner
> > >English.
> >
> >  I dont understand what you mean by "NS learner English" -
> do you mean
> > English of young children?  If you want access to a corpus
> of young
> > children's spoken English, try Polytechnic of Wales Corpus,
> see ICAME
> >  website: http://www.hd.uib.no/icame/newcd.htm for what's
> on ICAME CD,
> > http://khnt.hit.uib.no/icame/manuals/pow.htm for POW corpus manual
> >
> >  Another thought - I recently attended a "European Year of
> Languages"
> > symposium in Krakow, Poland, organised by British Council
> and others;
> > a consensus emerged that English has become the
> international lingua
> > franca of Europe, and is no longer "owned" by native
> speakers, it is
> > common property of the European (and international) community.  So,
> > the International English of a Polish speaker at this conference
> > should have equal "status" to the English used by native speakers.
> > Maybe there is scope for a European Corpus of English
> parallel to the
> > British National Corpus, where an object of study might be
> not "what
> > are  the deficiencies of learner Engish" but "what are the
> > regional/national  variations in English as written/spoken across
> > Europe".
> >
> >  Is your study in this vein?
> >
> >  Eric Atwell
> >
> >  --
> >  Eric Atwell, Distributed Multimedia Systems MSc Tutor &
> SOCRATES Tutor
> >  School of Computing, University of Leeds, LEEDS LS2 9JT
> >  TEL: 0113-2335430  MOBILE: 0775-1039104 FAX: 0113-2335468
> >  WWW: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/eric  EMAIL: eric at comp.leeds.ac.uk
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
>
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