2011

Book Cover This book contains the first in-depth corpus-based description of structural nativization at the lexis-grammar interface in Indian English, the largest institutionalized second-language variety of English world-wide. For a set of three ditransitive verbs give , send and offer –collocational patterns, verb-complementational preferences and correlations between collocational and verb-complementational routines are described. The present study is based on the comparison of the Indian and the British components of the International Corpus of English as well as a 100-million-word web-derived corpus of acrolectal Indian newspaper language and corresponding parts of the British National Corpus. The present corpus-based ‘thick description’ of lexicogrammatical routines provides new perspectives on the emergence of new routines and patternings in Indian English and is conceptually and methodologically relevant for research into varieties of English worldwide.

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Book Cover The articles in this volume are intended to bridge what Sridhar and Sridhar (1986) have called the 'paradigm gap' between traditional SLA research on the one hand and research into institutionalised second-language varieties in former colonial territories on the other. Since both learner Englishes and second-language varieties are typically non-native forms of English that emerge in language contact situations, it is high time that they are described and compared on an empirical basis in order to draw conceptual and theoretical conclusions with regard to their form, function and acquisition. The present collection of articles places special emphasis on empirical evidence obtained from large-scale analyses of computerised corpora of learner Englishes (such as the International Corpus of Learner English) and of second-language varieties of English (such as the International Corpus of English). It addresses questions such as 'Are the phenomena we find in ESL and EFL varieties features or errors?' or 'How common and wide-spread are features across contact varieties of English?'

Contents

Hundt & Mukherjee: Introduction: Bridging a paradigm gap
Biewer: Modal auxiliaries in second language varieties of English: A learner’s perspective
Bongartz & Buschfeld: English in Cyprus: Second language variety or learner English?
Gilquin & Granger: From EFL to ESL: Evidence from the International Corpus of Learner English
Götz & Schilk: Formulaic sequences in spoken ENL, ESL and EFL: Focus on British English, Indian English and learner English of advanced German learners
Gut: Studying structural innovations in New English varieties
Hilbert: Interrogative inversion as a learner phenomenon in English contact varieties: A case of Angloversals?
Hundt & Vogel: Overuse of the progressive in ESL and learner Englishes – fact or fiction?
Szmrecsanyi & Kortmann: Typological profiling: Learner Englishes versus indigenized L2 varieties of English
van Rooy: A principled distinction between error and conventionalized innovation in African Englishes
Hundt & Mukherjee: Discussion forum: New Englishes and Learner Englishes – quo vadis?

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Series editors: Thomas Kohnen and Joybrato Mukherjee.

The things we do with words are reflected in texts and we do things with texts just as we do things with words. This book sets out to explore how texts function in a given discourse community, and how the functions that texts may have in that particular community can be identified and assessed from a diachronic perspective. It systematically distinguishes general discourse functions (e.g. religious instruction) from more specific text functions (e.g. exegesis, exhortation), and outlines co-occurrence patterns of text functions for selected genres. A contrastive view of the evolution of these profiles ties the changes in individual genres to the complex and dynamic network of which they are a part. Combining corpus methodology with detailed qualitative discussion, this book identifies text functions as the performative centre of texts and shows how language variation and change strongly depend on the dynamics of the complete network of genres in the domain.

Contents:

Discourse functions and text functions - Communication forms of religious instruction in Early English - Functional genre profiles - Text functions: elaboration, transformation and dissolution - Genres as networks - Domain-based approaches to language variation and change.

About the author:

Tanja Rütten is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cologne and one of the compilers of the Corpus of English Religious Prose . She graduated in English literature, linguistics, and history from the University of Duisburg and also obtained a teaching degree. In 2010 she received her doctoral degree at the University of Cologne. Her main research interests are historical speech act theory, communication forms in Early English and variational linguistics.

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Schilk, Marco. 2011. Structural Nativization in Indian English Lexicogrammar. Studies in Corpus Linguistics 46. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Mukherjee, Joybrato; Hundt, Marianne, eds. 2011. Exploring Second-Language Varieties of English and Learner Englishes: Bridging a Paradigm Gap. Studies in Corpus Linguistics 44. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Rütten, Tanja. 2011. How to Do Things with Texts: Patterns of Instruction in Religious Discourse 1350-1700. English Corpus Linguistics 12. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.