Corpora: overuse and underuse of learner English; International English

[Christopher Brewster]

It should be remembered that in the case of Latin what was correct in the
Middle Ages was held to be the Latin of a handful of authors such as Caesar,
Cicero, Tacitus etc. Similarly with the use of Greek in the Byzantine
period, 'correct' was that which conformed with Attic Greek of a millennium
and more before. English has avoided having an 'Academy' and there is no
widely accepted 'golden' period of the English language. This would imply
that English is more vulnerable to the effect of international usage.
However, as linguists know, it is isolation that allows changes to develop
and become accepted parts of the language. Given the widespread and constant
communication in this period between many different groups using English, I
would expect that the language would not change significantly in spite of
its constant 'misuse'. In effect, errors  will not propagate into the
majority.

Christopher Brewster
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Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield
Tel: +44(0)114-22.21944  Fax: +44 (0)114-22.21810
Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street
Sheffield   S1 4DP   UNITED KINGDOM
Web: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~kiffer/
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no]On
> Behalf Of Tadeusz Piotrowski
> Sent: 13 December 2001 10:19
> To: corpora at hd.uib.no; 'yorick wilks'; 'Eric Atwell'; 'xiaotian guo'
> Cc: 'E S Atwell'
> Subject: RE: Corpora: overuse and underuse of learner English;
> International English
>
>
> 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