I find it fascinating that even on the *corpora* list, the discussion of essentially
conceptual questions on this topic has outweighed that of empirical ones so
far. As some contributors have indicated, these issues have been discussed for
a long time, but surely it is now time to investigate empirically what the most
salient features of English as a lingua franca might be.
It may be of interest to some corpora subscribers that I am in the process of
compiling a corpus of (spoken) ELF (English as a lingua franca) at the
University of Vienna (with support from Oxford University Press, hence the
name Vienna-Oxford ELF Corpus). Of course I intend to eventually make the
corpus available to the scientific community, and I will also post the details of
the relevant homepage here as soon as possible.
In the meantime, if anybody is interested in the rationale for it, I have sketched
this in an article just out in the _International Journal of Applied Linguistics_
11/2 entitled 'Closing a conceptual gap: the case for a description of English as
a lingua franca'. In this paper I also summarize what (relatively little) empirical
work has been done on ELF so far, esp. in the areas of phonology and
pragmatics.
A very detailed study already available for one level of language is Jennifer
Jenkins' _The phonology of English as an international language_ (OUP 2000).
And since Europe was specifically mentioned: there are some shorter articles
(eg by Jennifer Jenkins, myself, and by Juliane House, who is investigating the
pragmatics of ELF) on the Guardian Weekly website
http://www.guardianweekly.com/
under the heading '0100,0100,0100Times New Roman{HYPERLINK "http://www.guardian.co.uk/GWeekly/Global_English/0,8458,400340,00.html"}0000,0000,0000ArialGlobal English: the European lessons 0100,0100,0100Times New Roman'.
ArialBarbara SeidlhoferTimes New Roman
ArialEric Atwell wrote: ...
7F00,0000,0000> Maybe there is scope for a European Corpus of English parallel to the
> British National Corpus, where an object of study might be not "what are
> the deficiencies of learner Engish" but "what are the regional/national
> variations in English as written/spoken across Europe". ...
0000,0000,FF00Tadeusz Piotrowski's wrote:
7F00,0000,0000> It might be interesting to know what the overlap between different
> non-native varieties is, what the common core is. There must be,
> otherwise all those speakers could not communicate. That common core is
> perhaps the international variety. The international variety was very
> broadly described by Quirk and Gimson in their respective publications.
> I don't know whether somebody followed up.
> Another problem is, what is an error?
Prof. Dr. Barbara Seidlhofer
Institut für Anglistik
Universität Wien
Universitaetcampus AAKH/ Hof 8
Spitalgasse 2-4
A-1090 Vienna, Austria
phone (+431) 4277 424 42
fax (+431) 4277 9424