Old paradigm gap, new tools: A collostructional analysis of phrasal verbs in World and Learner Englishes
(2011) 4th International Conference of the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE) — Location: Brussels (1.December.2011)
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- A quarter of a century ago, Sridhar & Sridhar (1986) underlined the “absence of dialogue” between second language acquisition (SLA) and what they called indigenized varieties of English (IVEs, nowadays often referred to as “World Englishes”). SLA theories, in their attempt to gain insights into the intricate workings of learner language, were said to neglect indigenized varieties, failing to consider how these could contribute to the SLA paradigm. One of the reasons Sridhar & Sridhar offered for this neglect was the lack of empirical research on indigenized varieties of English. They therefore stressed the “urgent need for detailed studies of the acquisition of IVEs using systematic data collection procedures, rigorous analytical methods, and explicit reporting conventions” (p. 4). Since then, well-designed corpora representing not only indigenized varieties but also foreign language varieties of English have become widely available, as illustrated among others by the International Corpus of English (Greenbaum 1996) and the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al. 2002, 2009). Yet, it is only very recently that these resources have started to be exploited to compare World and Learner Englishes, in studies that have brought to light interesting parallelisms between the two types of varieties (cf. Nesselhauf 2009 or Mukherjee & Hundt 2011). In this presentation, I will make use of the most recent tools and methods of corpus linguistics to try to bridge the old paradigm gap brought to light by Sridhar & Sridhar (1986). Relying on corpus data from the British National Corpus (for native English), from the International Corpus of English (for World Englishes) and from the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al. 2009) and the Louvain International Database of Spoken English Interlanguage (Gilquin et al. 2010) for Learner Englishes, I will carry out a collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003) of phrasal verbs in these different varieties of English. More particularly, I will investigate and compare the verbs used with certain particles, with special emphasis on innovative combinations, such as 'cope up with', which turns out to occur both in World Englishes and Learner Englishes. Beyond the unavoidable differences, such similarities will plead for the type of rapprochement advocated by Sridhar & Sridhar quite some time ago.
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Gilquin, G. (2011). Old paradigm gap, new tools: A collostructional analysis of phrasal verbs in World and Learner Englishes. 4th International Conference of the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE), Brussels. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/225579