Corpus linguistics and non‐native varieties of English

Abstract

A B s T R A m This article derives from the internal discussions of a project that has just been launched and which may provide a useful example of modem comparative linguistics: the International Corpus of English (ICE). It concentrates on the problems which arise when the principles of corpus compilation, which were developed in native communities (ENL corpora) in the pre-sociolinguistic age, are applied to non-native communities (ESL corpora) such as Africa. In my opinion this reveals a crucial difficulty in corpus compilation that has been neglected in most corpus-linguistic work: the contrast and relationship between variation according to use and that according to user, or between stylistic sampling categories based on text types and sociolinguistic ones based on speaker/writer identity. Examples of such problems will be derived from the second-language corpus I am primarily concerned with, the Corpus of East African English, but the principles of sociostylistic variation in native and non-native varieties of English go far beyond this immediate context. They aim at combining two modern quantitatively oriented linguistic subdisciplines to their mutual benefit. After a brief introduction to the ICE project the following points are dealt with: first, the uses of computer-readable corpora for modern grammars and dictionaries in general (Section 2) and for applied (Section 3) and theoretical (Section 4) research on non-native varieties of English in particular, then the text type approach applied in ENL corpora so far (Section 5) and the sociolinguistic dimension with its relationship to stylistic variation (Section 6), followed by practical considerations for Third World Englishes (Section 7), and finally a multidimensional approach to socio-stylistic variation (Section 8) which may be necessary for transferring the ENL-based methodology of corpus compilation to ESL varieties.

Corpora and Language Education

“…Another concern raised relates to the sampling methodology employed for corpora of non-standard varieties of English. Schmied (1990) notes the potential mismatch between the stylistic sampling categories based on text types used for compiling corpora derived in native communities (ENL corpora) and the sociolinguistic ones based on speaker/writer identity for corpus compilation of non-native communities (ESL corpora), in this particular case the ICE Corpus of East African English. With reference to the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk), which, in fact, is a blanket term for several varieties ranging from the more middle-class Scottish Standard English to working-class Scots at the other end of a continuum, Douglas (2003) cautions against sampling on the basis of stratified genres, as is usually advocated.…”

Invariant tag questions in Pakistani English: a comparison with native and other non-native Englishes

“…For the purpose of quantitative analysis, corpus methodology (McEnery, Xiao, & Tono, 2005, p. 7-8) was used. Schmied (1990) observed that by using this methodology a researcher can confirm his or her hypotheses quantitatively and examine the inter-variety differences qualitatively.…”

Cultural discourse in the Corpus of East African English and beyond: possibilities and problems of lexical and collocational research in a one million‐word corpus

“…For collocational analyses the traditional standard 1-million word corpora can be too small, but the www is not a balanced sample. This is in stark contrast to ICE, where stratification had been the main aim when the ICE set-up was discussed at the beginning of the 1990s (Schmied, 1990). The www is a vast, unstructured but lop-sided text collection with a clear bias towards written and public genres.…”