Constrained communication in EFL and ESL: The case of embedded inversion
(2021) 42nd International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English Conference (ICAME 42) — Location: TU Dortmund University (online) (18.August.2021)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- Second language acquisition and contact linguistics have mostly been approached as different fields of research. Yet, the past decade has shown that the boundaries between these fields can be crossed thanks to the corpus-based comparison of English as a foreign language (EFL, aka Learner Englishes) and English as a second language (ESL, in the sense of New Englishes). The similarities found between the two types of varieties (see, e.g., Deshors et al. 2016) may be explained by the fact that they are both instances of so-called constrained communication, i.e., language production characterized by certain socio-cognitive constraints (Kruger & Van Rooy 2016). More precisely, EFL and ESL share the constraint of bilingual language activation, in that all EFL and ESL speakers use English as an additional, non-native language. The effect of this shared constraint is here investigated through embedded inversion (EI), i.e., the inversion of SV word order in indirect questions, as illustrated by “One should ask then at what expense have these benefits been reached” (ICE-Sing). EI represents a non-standard feature which has been found to be attested in many geographically distant ESL varieties (cf. Sand & Kolbe 2010). We ask whether EI can also be found in EFL and, beyond attestation, whether common linguistic realizations appear in EFL and ESL, for example phraseological patterns that tend that favour EI. Our study relies on several (sub)corpora of EFL and ESL (ICLE, LINDSEI, ICE) which, besides the common bilingual constraint, differ along constraint dimensions like modality (speech/writing) and task expertise (novice/expert writing) (cf. Kotze 2020). Cases of EI are retrieved by manually examining the concordances of 114 verbs taken from Biber et al. (1999). The data is further annotated for linguistic variables that have been found to influence the occurrence of EI, such as chunks with the verb BE and subject length. The significance of the different variables is analysed with the R table.plotter function (Gries 2009). The analysis shows that EI, though relatively rare, is found in both EFL and ESL, and in partly similar contexts (e.g. with the chunk “what’s” or in the second part of a coordinated embedded clause). Some constraints appear to play a role in the use of EI, such as the degree of expertise, with EI being more frequent among novice than expert writers.
- Affiliations
Citations
Gilquin, G., & Meriläinen, L. (2021). Constrained communication in EFL and ESL: The case of embedded inversion. 42nd International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English Conference (ICAME 42), TU Dortmund University (online). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/107503