Mind the gap!

Abstract

A paradigm gap has long separated the fields of World Englishes and Learner Englishes: they have mainly been dealt with separately and very little consideration has been given to the features that they might share. Recently, however, Nesselhauf (2009) has highlighted that some features thought to be variety-specific are in fact shared by World and Learner varieties. This paper examines their use of the high-frequency verb make in samples of corpora of student writing of four World Englishes, four Learner Englishes and a control corpus of English as a Native Language (ENL). This case study shows that, quantitatively, the World and Learner varieties are mainly characterized by heterogeneity, while qualitatively, a number of similarities distinguish them from ENL.

Complementation of Light Verb Constructions in World Englishes: A Corpus-based Study

“…Have and give are also more frequent in British and Sri Lankan English in comparison to Indian English where take is more often used (Bernaisch, 2015, 177). Make has the highest frequency in Kenyan English when compared to Jamaican, Indian, and Singaporean Englishes (Laporte, 2012). It is also the second most frequent light verb after have in Australian, New Zealand, and British Englishes with the light verb give being slightly less frequently used and take the least used light verb in these varieties (Smith, 2009, 146, 154).…”

“…Though English plays an important role in the outer circle countries, communities of these countries are proud of distinctive features of their varieties which are expressions of their identity (Laporte, 2012). Schneider (2003) proposes five stages in his model of the evolution of new Englishes: foundation, exonormative stabilization, nativization, endonormative stabilization, differentiation.…”

“…The cline of evolution of English varieties in Schneider's model (Laporte, 2012) As seen from Figure 1, non-native varieties of English have progressed into different phases of evolution. Differences in evolutionary development of Asian Englishes is especially evident: Honk Kong English has advanced into phase 3 with some traces of phase 2, Malaysian and Philippine Englishes have reached phase 3, Indian English is found in phase4 with some features of phase 3, whereas Singaporean English is the most advanced among Asian Englishes since it has reached phase 5 with some characteristics of phase4.…”

EFL and/vs. ESL?

“…The second analytical limitation is directly related to the first: Given the scarcity of contextual features included in analyses, existing studies are typically not multifactorial in nature and, thus, at a risk of (i) masking the real complexity of cooccurrence patterns in the data and (ii) therefore, making generalizations about the linguistic structure of non-native varieties (as in Biewer 2011 andNesselhauf 2009) that may not be supported in more comprehensive studies. It is worth noting, however, that some studies recognize the need for contextual information and they compensate for it with qualitative observations, at least to some extent (e.g., Gilquin & Granger 2011, Hundt & Vogel 2011, or Laporte 2012. (We say "to some extent" because, while qualitative analysis and interpretation are necessary and can be useful, no analyst's mind is able to really uncover and realistically weigh the presence of, say, a dozen factors influencing a particular linguistic choice and their interactions.…”

Editorial practice and the progressive in Black South African English

“…). There is also synchronic evidence that learner varieties and New Englishes exist on a varietal continuum, rather than as discrete varieties (Nesselhauf ; Gilquin & Granger ; Laporte ; Deshors ; Gilquin ; Edwards & Laporte ). All of these findings provide support for an overlap between learner varieties and New Englishes, but also raise questions about the distinction between the two.…”