[Corpora-List] 'Standard European English' ?

[Eric Atwell]

On Fri, 3 Mar 2006, Yorick Wilks wrote:

> One version of this discussion was had a few years ago when it was seriously 
> proposed---I forget who by--to create a corpus of "non-native English"; not a 
> corpus of specific Englishes  from specific non-native groups

There are several existing specific national non-native-English corpora;
surely if these are put together, the result is a general corpus?
eg see http://cecl.fltr.ucl.ac.be/Cecl-Projects/Icle/icle.htm

"... The Louvain Centre for English Corpus Linguistics ... computerised
databank known as the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE)
... currently contains over 2 million words of writing by learners of
English from 19 different mother tongue backgrounds ... and is made up
of 19 distinct sub-corpora,each containing one language variety
(E2French, E2German, E2Swedish etc). ... At the moment several
international teams are running research projects in the areas of
interlanguage syntax, lexis and discourse features ..."

Also, each of my students will submit as coursework a mini-corpus for a
specific national English, so the combined courseworks (sic) will
provide a (small) general corpus of international English.


Eric Atwell, Leeds University