[Corpora-List] ACL proceedings paper in the American National Corpus

Simon G. J. Smith smithsgj at eee.bham.ac.uk
Fri Sep 27 20:18:31 UTC 2002


> > Note that this applies to papers whose authors are native speakers of
> > American English only.
>
> Two questions. What is your definition of native speaker? and how are you
> going to determine who meets your definition? This is not as trivial as it may sound.


No, not trivial at all. I presume, though, that since (surely) no records are kept on researchers' linguistic origins, they will simply have to ask everyone if they think they qualify: just as job applicants and others are asked to supply details of what they consider to be their ethnic origin, for statistical purposes.

But I'm still curious as to what happens in the not uncommon case where a paper is jointly authored by native and non-native speakers. It can't depend purely on the linguistic origin of the person doing the presentation, because it's the written paper that's being archived, not the talk. The first-named author, perhaps? Or is it safe to assume that if *any* native speakers contributed, someone will have rendered the text into a style sufficiently native-like to qualify anyway. Tricky.



More information about the Corpora mailing list