Syntactic variation in interactions
across international Englishes
Discussions of World Englishes mainly concentrate on the particularities of
individual varieties of English spoken in the different parts of the world.
There is, however, another form ofWorld English which emerges when
speakers of different international varieties interact with each other.When
English is the mother tongue of neither of the speakers who use the language
for communicative purposes, they employ it as a lingua franca. This paper
describes the syntactic variation found in this variety of English. It presents
the results of analyses of a corpus containing 22 hours of naturally occurring
interactions and describes both unsystematic as well as (seemingly) systematic
grammatical choices made by the speakers. The results reveal that, not
unlike the processes which have previously been documented for dialect
contact, interactions across international Englishes are characterised by
processes of levelling and regularisation, whilst at the same time individual
speakers retain the characteristics of their original varieties. Individual
Englishes are further constrained by transfer processes and interlanguage
patterns.
1. Introduction
According to(1983), English is, geographically, used in three different
contexts: the inner, outer and expanding circle. These circles are traditionally
held to represent different ways in which English is both acquired and used.
Whereas the inner circle is characterised by the use of English as the primary
language and by the fact that it is acquired as a mother tongue (L1), the
language largely has the status of a second or foreign language in the two other
circles. However, speakers in the outer circle use English as an institutionalised
second language, often yielding indigenised forms, whereas speakers in the
expanding circle traditionally acquire English through formal instruction
following the model of either standard British (BrE) or American English
(AmE), and usually do not use English for communication purposes within
their individual home countries. In all three circles, individual varieties of
English have developed, and increasingly frequent global migration has resulted
in an upsurge of interactions involving the participation of speakers of these
different Englishes. This paper discusses interactions involving non-native
speakers from the outer and the expanding circle as a particular case of interactions
across Englishes. After placing these interactions within the larger frame
of interactions across Englishes, the core chapters discuss the variation that the
data reveal with regard to syntax. In the individual chapters, special focus is
placed both on features which the individual speakers carry into the interactions
and on particularities arising out of the interactions.
2. The history of interactions across Englishes
Interactions across Englishes have existed ever since regional variation arose,
thus, probably ever since English was formed and its early dialects developed.
Prior to the discovery and settlement of America and the subsequent spread of
English across the globe, such interactions were confined to the British Isles
(e.g. the metropolitan area of London). Contact between dialects leads to dialect
mixing, and the result of such lectal contact has commonly been described as
koinéisation, which involves a number of linguistic processes: dialect mixing,
dialect levelling and simplification (1986). But as (1993.)
points out, koinéisation does not necessarily result in the formation of a koiné.
Rather, the contact of closely related linguistic subsystems involves a series of
stages: At the initial, unstable stage, the forms of the individual varieties are
used interchangeably; at the subsequent stage, norms develop for the use of a
stabilised koiné, which may later be expanded to serve individual communicative
functions. However, this process may terminate at any of its stages without
eventually yielding a stable new variety.
Today, the situation has increased in complexity: First, many more varieties
of English exist due to the expansion of the usage areas through British and
Syntactic variation in interactions across international Englishes 111
American influence and, second, increased global migration results in frequent
contact between speakers who usually do not mix into a stable community but
rather into one which is in constant flux.
2.1 World English(es), New Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and
interactions across Englishes
World Englishes, it seems, still fall into two categories. A large number of
Englishes used outside the traditional L1 regions have acquired stable and
systematic forms, which assures them the status of regional varieties in their
own rights, as New Englishes (1984). Assigning the status
of New English to an individual variety, according to
(1984), requires that the variety should have developed through the education
system, and that it has come to be used for a wide range of functions (e.g.
in the media, parliament and/or administration) in an area to which English
was transported. Formally, the variety needs to have developed its own features
with regard to phonology, syntax, lexicon, etc. Other forms of English which do
not differ from the L1 varieties in a systematic but rather in an irregular way are
commonly still discussed as learner Englishes ( 2002), based on the
assumption that in their case unsystematic deviations are reflections of particular
developmental stages within an as yet incomplete acquisition process in an
individual learner, or, more precisely, of “the internal system that a learner has
constructed at a single point in time” ( 1994).
1 These Englishes are general-ly held to occur in contexts in which the language is not commonly used for
communicative purposes outside the classroom in which it is taught.
Interactions across different World Englishes can potentially involve
speakers from any of the three circles. Such conversations had not been very
much at the focus of researchers’ interest up until the 1990s. Since then there
has been a growing interest in conversations involving mainly non-native
speakers of English (see below for a review of individual studies). In cases where
all speakers involved in a conversation have mother tongues other than English
but communicate in English, they use the language as a lingua franca. As a
lingua franca, English may be used either intranationally, as is the case e.g. in
India or Nigeria, or internationally (e.g. between Germans and Mexicans).
Speakers of intranational lingua francas have usually acquired them as nativised
second languages and use them in a variety of domains. Most participants in
international lingua franca conversations, on the other hand, may be regarded
as (ex-)learners of a language they use for restricted purposes only.
Generally, communication in English as a lingua franca (ELF) is a complex
process. It involves participants who are representatives of different individual
first languages and who therefore have their individual linguistic backgrounds
regarding both structural forms as well as communicative norms and standards.
We may therefore expect transfer from the different mother tongues. At the
same time, especially speakers from the expanding circle usually acquire the
norms of either BrE or AmE to a certain degree when learning the language.
Thus, ELF may involve the direct or indirect interplay of three or even more
linguistic systems. Still, these processes have only recently become an object of
scholarly investigation.
2.2 Lingua franca communication research
ELF communication was initially discussed as a particular case of non-native/
non-native communication, and early studies, which originated from within the
interlanguage paradigm, approached lingua franca conversations as interactions
between learners. (1980) as well as (1985) investi-
gated the negotiation of meaning between non-native speakers of English with
different linguistic backgrounds.
2 From a similar perspective, (1990)studied the management of verbal conflict among Indian, Chinese and Korean
students interacting in ELF.
The first detailed discussion of sociolinguistic aspects of ELF was that of
(1991), who provided the theoretical background for the understanding
of lingua franca communication. Subsequent studies approached the subject
from a more empirical angle: (1990, 1996) and
(1993) analysed business telephone conversations between speakers of different
European mother tongues, adopting an interactional approach and focussing
on the way participants cooperate to achieve the goal of their conversation.
(1994) and (1996, 1998, 2000) provide analyses of the
discourse features of small talk in lingua franca. (2002) discusses topic
management strategies chosen by European students of English to arrive
efficiently at a joint decision in a simulated meeting, and (2002) concen-
trates on pragmatic dysfluencies in conversations among international students
at the University of Hamburg.
The structural levels of phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of ELF
have only recently become the focus of scholarly interest. This might be due to
the fact that, until now, there has been a predominant focus on successful
interaction in lingua franca communication by scholars (1990, 1996),
who proposed that speakers in these conversations largely accept ambiguity and
let potential trouble sources pass. Recently, a number of research projects have
been launched to investigate ELF from a more structural and descriptive angle,
mainly with the aim of providing corpora, whichmay eventually serve as a basis
for syllabus design in English language teaching. (2000) provided an
early study into the phonological characteristics of ELF by identifying phonological
features which cause unintelligibility and/or miscommunication. At the
University of Klagenfurt, Allan James is pursuing pilot projects on the position and
perception of English as a lingua franca in the Alpine-Adriatic area ( 2000).
Barbara Seidlhofer has initiated the compilation of a more general ELF corpus
project at theUniversity ofVienna (2001), and collects
ELF data in academic settings at the University ( 2003).
Unfortunately, there is to date no study into interactions across different
varieties of English which focuses on syntax. This paper seeks to contribute to
closing this gap and to our understanding of the syntactic variation which
characterises ELF in informal conversations.
3. World Englishes and syntax
As (1984), (1987) and, more recently, Schmied
(1991) and (1996) point out, New Englishes generally share a number of
grammatical features.
3 Based on a review of existing studies,(1984) sum up an extensive list of features which they found to correspond
across individual New Englishes. With regard to the noun phrase (NP), there
are tendencies to change the NP’s word order, not to mark plurality, to differ
with regard to the determination of nouns, and to make no distinction between
the third person pronouns he and she. Processes characterising the verb phrase
are the extension of the progressive aspect to stative verbs, failure to mark verbs
for third person singular in the present tense form or for past tense, and the
mixing of tense and aspect systems. At the clause level, ellipsis of subject and
object pronouns, pronoun copying (see topicalisation below), uninverted
constituents in interrogative constructions, and the use of an invariant question
tag formare common.Many of these features have been confirmed by
(1987) for the New Englishes. And (1991) even proposes that
Englishes in general share tendencies in their individual developments. Preceding
his explication of what he calls African tendencies, which involve additions
to, omissions from and modifications to the grammatical system of Standard
English, he points out that his discussion
does not mean that these tendencies do not occur in other second-language
varieties too, or even in some first-language varieties in Britain, America or
Australia. Partly at least English varieties all seem to develop in similar directions,
as for instance in terms of simplification and regularization. (1991)
Similarities and regularities across individual varieties have also been proposed
with relation to learner Englishes. From within the interlanguage paradigm,
second language Englishes are mostly held to develop along similar patterns,
which implies that certain grammatical/syntactical processes such as negation
are acquired along similar stages by all learners of English. (There are, however,
deviations from the pattern depending on the mother tongue of the learners, as
1982 or 1996 ; 2001
indicates with regard to negation, individual developmental patterns may also
be more complex than initial research has suggested.)
Both stable indigenised forms and variable interlanguage productions mix
in ELF interactions and result in an increased need for speakers to develop
strategies allowing for successful communication despite the heterogeneity of
the varieties they use.
4. Levelling in interactions across Englishes
As I have pointed out above, interaction across regional varieties of English
involves lectal contact, and such contact situations have been found to be characterised
by dialect mixture and koinéisation. (1986) points out that
Levelling involves “reduction or attrition of marked variants”
(1986), and simplification means an increase in regularity, especially at the
level of morphology. Other processes which Trudgill examines with reference
to national Englishes are reallocation and interdialect forms, new forms which
“occur in neither of the dialects in contact, and yet arise out of their interaction
one with the other” (1986). (1993)
analyse grammatical variation in urban dialects and suggest that researchers
acknowledge the development of a “standardising non-standard variety of
English”, since “there do indeed seem to be certain grammatical features that
are common to the English spoken in the major urban centres of Britain”.
Similar to these processes which characterise dialect contact, international lects
of English may merge into a form characterised by a set of linguistic processes
similar to dialect contact. Yet unlike dialect contact, ELF cannot really be conceived
as a permanent formof English, since its users do not constitute a stable
community. Rather, it is a variety in constant flux, involving different constellations
of speakers of diverse individual Englishes in every single interaction.
5. Syntax in ELF interactions
Since by definition ELF interactions involve different Englishes being used by
the individual participants, it is unlikely that ELF will possess a homogeneous
formof syntax. Speakers from the outer circle are commonly assumed to speak
a nativised or indigenised variety of English ( 1983), which is character-
ised by a number of fairly stable characteristics. However, the syntax of productions
by speakers from the expanding circle cannot be described as easily. In
these cases, two different aspects need to be taken into consideration. Many of
the speakers are learners of the language they use for interaction and they follow
certain developmental patterns. At the same time, their linguistic productions
may be characterised by transfer from their first languages.
From within the interlanguage framework, the grammatical system of
learner language has been conceived as a transitional structure (in the sense of
1982), i.e. it involves a series of forms or structures
which learners use en route to mastering the target language form. These
interim forms are indicative of the developmental stages that learners pass
through on their way to target language competence. For example, negation is
acquired through an initial stage of using an external negator placed outside of
the utterance, via using an utterance-internal dummy negator (mainly no)
towards target language competence. Because of their interim character, learner
Englishes are held to be unstable and also deficient forms of English, developing
along a continuum towards complete mastery of the target language norm.
From within a variationist perspective, however, the different Englishes
produced by speakers for whom the language is not their first language are
understood as being varieties in their own rights, and the assumption that
learners aim at complete mastery of either British or American English has
come to be seriously questioned. Given that a large proportion of non-native
speakers’ interactions in English do not involve native speakers at all
( 1991), it seems justifiable to claim that the goal of nativeness is no
longer a canonical criterion.
6. The present study’s database
The following discussions are based on a corpus of approximately 22 hours of
informal interactions between speakers of English who originate from countries
generally considered to belong to the outer or to the expanding circle.
4 For allof the 49 speakers included in the corpus, English is neither the first nor the
dominant language, i.e. English is not their mother tongue, and they do not use
English for the majority of their communicative activities. During the period in
which the recordings were made, all speakers were immersed in an Englishspeaking
environment. Most of the conversations which make up my corpus
were collected in a student hall of residence in the UK, where dinner conversations
were taped over a period of nine months. Additionally, interactions were
recorded at the University of Erfurt in a semi-natural context. Here, foreign
exchange students were recorded when they had met to participate in an accent
perception test. After the speakers had arrived to do the test, the research
assistant left them on their own for approximately twenty minutes, thus allowing
for spontaneous conversation between the students. English served as a medium
for either daily interactions in the speakers’ jobs or as the medium of instruction
during their ongoing studies in e.g. accounting or the arts, although the extent
to which individual speakers were involved in interactions with native speakers
of English differed. Also, the time which speakers had spent in English-speaking
environments varied. The participants in all of these conversations come from
a vast range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, as Table 1 documents. Their
home countries are in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
The competence levels of the individual speakers varied to a great extent,
with some speakers having reached native-like communicative competence in
the language whereas others still had difficulties to express their communicative
intentions in an appropriate manner. For the purpose of this study, a speaker
was considered to be communicatively competent if s/he could form turns
which were grammatically structured (i.e. they conform to the grammatical
rules of the English language), adapted to the linguistic resources available,
suitable for the circumstances relevant to the conversation, and commonly used
in the particular situation ( 1984). The following sections present
the results of detailed descriptive analyses of the data.
7. Syntactically “marked” versus “regular” utterances in the
speakers’ productions
To describe the productions and processes which characterise ELF at the level
of syntax, the data was first analysed quantitatively, and individual utterances
were classified as being either regular, marked or doubtful. The category
“regular” refers to utterances which conformto the grammatical norms of one
of the L1 varieties of English. Utterances which were marked as belonging to a
nativised or second language variety through a particular syntactic form were
rated “marked”. Those utterances which could not definitely be classified as
either marked or regular were coded “doubtful”.
5 The corpus comprises of atotal of 4 525 utterances; 2 462 were one-word utterances and not utilised for
the analyses. Thus, the total number of utterances assessed was 2 063. As
Figure 1 demonstrates, the utterances produced by speakers in lingua franca
interactions overwhelmingly comply with the grammatical rules of the L1
varieties BrE and AmE.
In total, 88% of all turns were judged to be regular, i.e. they complied with
the grammatical rules of the L1 varieties of English. Examples (1)–(4) indicate
that regular utterances are of varying complexity, ranging from simple structures
as in (1) to coordination as in (3) and subordination as in (4).
6(1) E:h, uhm and it’s about the kitchen, and construction uhm. (Spain)
(2) Uh I guess it’s like .. every/all all the countries want a certain standard or
something like that. (Pakistan)
(3) There is a vaccine for malaria, but it’s not very reliable and it’s very expensive,
so / (Nigeria)
(4) It’s ten pence if you go to the shop. (Iraq)
Only 9% of the utterances clearly diverged from L1-English norms, and another
3% of the utterances contained constructions which were doubtful but could
not be classified as either regular or marked. If these figures are broken down to
contrast speakers from the outer circle with those from the expanding circle, the
picture becomes considerably more complex.
Speakers from countries belonging to the outer circle as well as competent
speakers from countries located in the expanding circle had only very limited
instances of utteranceswhich diverge from the British or American norm, i.e. 94%
of the utterances produced by speakers from the outer circle were regular ones.
This figure is astonishingly high, since it contradicts the assumption that speakers
would carry the characteristic features of their nativised varieties into the ELF
interactions. Also, 95% of the utterances observed with competent speakers from
the expanding circlewere regular. The second figure is less surprising than the first
one, since speakers in the expanding circle usually have acquired English in an
institutional context with either BrE or AmE serving as the target variety. Also,
the difference in percentages observable between competent and less competent
speakers is significant but not surprising. Less competent speakers from
countries within the expanding circle produced a considerably higher number
of utterances, i.e. 22%, which diverged grammatically from BrE or AmE.
However, the syntactic features differed with regard to the linguistic background
of the speakers. Whereas the productions by speakers from the outer
circle displayed the systematic characteristics that have already been documented
for the varieties of English they speak, speakers from the expanding circle
reveal less stable features, except for those particularities which are reflections
of interlanguage developmental stages. These included negation, passivisation
and word order. Apart from features individual participants carry into the
interactions, there are two processes which develop out of the interaction:
simplification in the form of shortened utterances and regularisation through
fronting of individual elements.
7.1 Productions by speakers from countries located in the outer circle
As Table 1 documents, 19 speakers participating in the recorded interactions
originated from countries located in the outer circle. Of these, nine African
speakers came from Botswana, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia and thus
represent varieties usually described as East African,West African and Southern
African. Furthermore, there are seven speakers who were born in Pakistan and
used a formof Indian English, two Indians and one speaker fromMalaysia, who
did not employ any constructions which could have been identified as characteristic
of Malaysian English. In those rare cases in which speakers from the
outer circle used a syntactically marked form (n = 35), this form was generally
one of those associated with the particular variety of English spoken in their
home countries, as the examples presented below document. There are hardly
any differences between the percentages of grammatically regular utterances
obtained from these 19 speakers,
7 apart from the fact that the Malay speakerproduced an overwhelming 99% of regular utterances, and the one utterance
which is marked does not reveal features usually discussed as being characteristic
of Malaysian English.
8The next set of examples, (5)–(10), presents utterances produced by the seven
Pakistani speakers. As (2002:327) states, the grammatical particulari-
ties of Pakistani English are similar to those of northern Indian English. They
include a lack of subject–auxiliary inversion in interrogatives, a usage of the
definite article “as if the traditional conventions have been reversed”,
9 anextended usage of the progressive aspect to stative verbs, a preference for the
present perfect over the simple past, and the use of the present continuous for
past actions (2002.). The utterances collected in my corpus in
part reflect these typical constructions.
(6) And if it is just normal person, eh then you will say tum. (Pakistan)
(7) I mean, somebody told me, Nigerian degree is not accepted. (Pakistan)
(8) We went to supermarket. (Pakistan)
(9) The person who was owning the shop. (Pakistan)
(10) Why I shouldn’t call him a doctor? (Pakistan)
The particular use or non-use of the definite and indefinite article (5–8) makes
up the majority of all marked utterances produced by Pakistani speakers. But
there are also individual utterances displaying the characteristic use of the
progressive form in references to the past (9) and the lack of subject–auxiliary
inversion in interrogative constructions (10). However, the data does not yield
examples of deviations from the L1 varieties with regard to either verb complementation
or a use of the present perfect to indicate a past activity rather than
perfective aspect.
Specific particularities can also be observed in speakers from African
countries (Zambia, Nigeria, Kenya). Grammatical features of African new
Englishes
10 have been described, e.g. by (1991), who prefers to speakof African tendencies which, according to him, involve—among other features
—the omission of determiners in front of certain nouns, extension of progressive
constructions to stative verbs, and variation with regard to verb complementation.
(2002) also concentrates largely on noun and verb phrase
grammar. In a section on Nigerian English (2002), he lists e.g. the treatment
of uncountable nouns as countable nouns, a seemingly reversed usage
pattern for definite articles, and a particular use of prepositions as specific
characteristics of this nativised variety.
The utterances produced by speakers from African countries inmy data do
not display a particular pattern of article use, but rather features such as a lack
of subject–auxiliary inversion in the construction of WH-interrogatives (11)
and particularities with regard to the use of prepositions (12)–(13).
(11) When you will start practicing? (Zambia)
(12) The strongest man from the Middle East. (Nigeria)
(13) You learn so much of medicine… (Nigeria)
The utterance in (11) contains a when, but the inversion of subject and auxiliary
verb, which usually accompanies question formation, is not present there.Most
of the marked utterances produced by African speakers differ from the traditional
L1 varieties in that they use a preposition which would not commonly be
employed in the given position in either of the traditional native speaker
varieties. In (12), the Nigerian speaker uses from where BrE and AmE would
have
in the Middle East, and in (13), BrE would favour about medicine insteadof an expression containing the preposition of.
In conclusion, the few instances of marked utterances observed in speakers
from the outer circle are characterised by their retaining the peculiarities of
their individual varieties, such as pronoun deletion, word-order patterns or a
particular use of prepositions. However, characteristic patterns of tense and
aspect were not documented in the corpus.
7.2 Productions by speakers from countries located in
the expanding circle
The following discussion will concentrate on the productions observed with less
competent speakers from the expanding circle, since — as I have stated above
— these speakers produced significantly more marked utterances than those
speakers from the expanding circle who had acquired English at a very competent
level. The less competent speakers’ Englishes reveal particularities which
can be identified as either resulting from transfer from their mother tongues or
as being the result of developmental patterns. The subsequent explications will
largely be restricted to a set of utterances produced by speakers form Iraq,
Korea and France. Arabic speakers in general are faced with numerous significant
differences between their mother tongue and English grammar: E.g. unlike
English, Arabic places the verb in sentence-initial position, followed by the
subject; there is no equivalent to the auxiliary do, and questions are marked by
rising intonation only; Arabic has no copula ( 1987). Examples
(14) and (15) were observed with an Arabic speaker from Iraq.
(14) You courage to study. (Iraq)
(15) His name, Tirak. …I don’t know. Tiran. I pronouncemaybe wrong. (Iraq)
His utterances indicate a stage of acquisition at which he has not mastered
passive constructions (14). The speakers were talking about the atmosphere in
the British Library, and the meaning intended was ‘You are encouraged to
study’. The speaker furthermore seems to confuse the noun courage and the
verb to encourage, which is probably due to L1 transfer. Arabic indicates
individual word classes and their forms by adding fixed vowel patterns to a
three-consonant root rather than through affixation. Basic word order patterns
for declarative structures also seem not to have been acquired correctly (15).
The first utterance in his turn lacks the copula form is, and in the third utterance
the adverb maybe is positioned in the middle of the verb phrase instead of
being inserted to the left of the clause. This, however, seems not to be due to L1
transfer, since Arabic word order, in which the verb is placed in first position,
followed by the subject, is not reflected in the speaker’s utterance.
Transfer is not generally manifest in the productions encountered with less
competent expanding circle speakers in the corpus. Korean is also a language
whose structure differs considerably from English.
(16) Your family living here? (Korea)
(17) They didn’t interest in my work. (Korea)
(18) We not cooked the seaweed. (Korea)
In example (16), the speaker’s utterance lacks the copula, which may be due to
Korean grammatical influence. Korean uses auxiliaries neither to form questions
nor to negate sentences but rather employs a question particle added at
the end of a sentence. In contrast, the other two utterances produced by a
female Korean speaker rather reveal the unstable character of her variety of
English.Whereas in (17) she integrates the negator not into the auxiliary do, she
does not do so in (18) where, although the negator is placed inside the VP, the
auxiliary do is not used.
The interlanguage character of the Englishes spoken by some of the
speakers in the corpus is also evident in the productions of a French speaker.
Two of her utterances are presented below:
(19) At our house eh .. a lot. But here no. (France)
(20) You didn’t found? (France)
In (19) she negates the second sentence by simply positioning the negator no at
the end of the clause. This strategy of external negation is indicative of an early
acquisitional stage (1994). Somewhat differently, and similarly to what has
been observed in (17) above, the speaker integrates the negator not into the
auxiliary do in example (20). Although she thus seems to be aware of the target
language rule for sentential negation, she does not apply it consistently, and at the
same time she does not manage to mark the negative utterance correctly for tense.
The corpus furthermore contains individual utterances which cannot easily
be explained as being the result of either transfer or interlanguage development.
In the case of (21), it seems that the Norwegian speaker either confused also and
as well, or misplaced the word also.
(21) You forget the milk also. (Norway)
The utterance produced by the German speaker in (22) needs to be discussed in
relation to the context it was observed in:
(22) We never do at home. (Germany)
It occurs after the three speakers who participate in the conversation (a female,
competent German, a male, less competent German, and a female, less competent
Korean) during which the utterance occurs have already discussed traditional
German-style cooking and especially the preparation of roasts for some
time. This culminates in the German female saying I can’t cook German meat.
The utterance We never do at home is a direct follow-up on her statement and
refers to cooking roast meat, which would need to be indicated by a pro-form
such as so or it to render the utterance grammatical. Such a pro-form is,
however, missing in (22).
All the above examples illustrate that the majority of the productions by
speakers from the expanding circle were characterised by particularities which
relate to both the interlanguage character of their form of English and transfer
phenomena. In contrast to the utterances produced by speakers from the outer
circle, there is considerably higher heterogeneity with regard to the particularities
observed.
Although in some cases there are extreme divergences from the rules of
L1-Englishes which may even result in comprehension problems, these constructions
hardly ever caused a breakdown in the conversation or necessitated
a negotiation of meaning sequence. In fact, the corpus contains only nine
instances of problematic communication, five of which were negotiation
sequences caused by vocabulary gaps. The other four cases involve a complete
breakdown of the conversation, which generally occurred after participants had
failed to arrive at a joint basis for their interaction when they were apparently
operating on diverging background assumptions. The low number of instances
of impaired interaction might be due to interactional processes, which could be
observed with the speakers interacting across their different Englishes. These
processes will be addressed in the next section.
7.3 Interactional modifications
Besides the marked syntactic structures in the individual speakers’ productions,
the interactions inmy corpus are characterised by a number of strategies which
participants in the conversations employ to modify their utterances in a way
which seems to render discourse easier to process. This involves an avoidance
of long utterances by segmenting these into smaller units separated either
through intonation patterns, i.e. falling intonation at the end of a unit, or by
pauses. Also, individual elements of utterances are frequently fronted to
enhance comprehensibility.
7.3.1 Simplification: Segmented utterances
Apart from being characterised by L1-transfer and developmental patterns,
conversations between speakers of different varieties from the outer and
expanding circles imply interaction between speakers of different competence
levels. Although the vast majority of the utterances produced in the ELF
interactions are unmarked, as the above discussion has documented, the more
competent speakers nevertheless seemed to accommodate to the less competent
ones. Unlike what (1975) has identified as foreigner talk, which
results in a use of ungrammatical forms, the accommodation processes I have
found in my data rather resemble what (1994: 254) discusses as modifica-
tion processes in the formof either simplification or regularisation. Simplification—
for Ellis—manifests itself in the use of a lower speech rate and a higher
frequency of unfilled pauses in the productions of the more competent speakers.
In my corpus, simplification can also be observed at the level of syntax,
where it results in a reduced complexity of the individual utterances in that
hypotaxis seldom occurs. Instead of forming complex sentences, speakers prefer
to split up sentences into smaller units that are cognitively easier to process. The
following data excerpt presents an extended turn by a fully bilingual Pakistani
speaker taken from a conversation between himself and a less competent
speaker from Germany:
(23) Then you just do: the administrative work. E:h you don’t have to actually
add up or anything like that. No- no mathematical work. But when you
work for a practice, then you do a bit of all, everything. Taxation, accounting,
this and that. But .. if you are working in industry. Say there is
a firm of ehm .. soap manufacturers. They employ you. …As a company
secretary. Then you don’t actually .. do any figures .. you just deal with
their legal matters. Represent them legally. Deal with their registrar, and
things like tha:t. And their solicitors, and like that. But not if you: …if
you work for a practice. Then you have to do a lot of things. That is very
…. It’s boring. It’s good to do it…in the beginning. ’Cause it’s a good
experience. But not always.…’Cause people who work in a practice…
they do the same work every year. Same work, same…same clients,
same work.
The utterances are often shortened or segmented into clausal or phrasal units
which form the basic informational units of the interactions. In a number of
instances the units do not contain a completed phrase or clause. Segmentation
is a strategy to make discourse easier to process for the interlocutor, and this is
noticeable e.g. in example (23), when the speaker talks about the different jobs
an accountant would be doing in industry and in a private practice. Instead of
using complex sentences involving subordination, he splits up his information
into simpler units if you are working in industry, then you don’t actually, and
doany figures.
Presumably, his linguistic performance reflects a cognitive strategyintended to benefit less proficient speakers. At the same time, it allows for the
interlocutor to signal either understanding or non-comprehension through
back-channels or other signals.
This behaviour can be observed both with speakers from the outer circle
and with competent speakers from the expanding circle, as with the male
participant from Botswana in (24).
(24) So…they .. they give sort of uh German aid, you see. …The government
of Germany. So…some some very good students .. eventually they
rise from being students to .. to being lecturers, you see.
In addition to such simplification, regularisation is also common in the syntax
of the speakers’ utterances. It “entails the selection of forms that are in some
way […] explicit” ( 1994).
7.3.2 Regularisation: Topicalisation strategies in ELF interactions
For (1994: 255), regularisation is a further process through which native
speakers modify their speech directed to non-native speakers. Ellis draws on a
number of individual studies which have documented that grammatical
foreigner talk is, among other features, characterised by such regularisation
strategies, in the sense of raising explicitness. At the linguistic surface level, this
manifests itself e.g. through topicalisation, the movement of focussed information
to the front of the utterance.
The strategy of moving pieces of information to the front of the sentence,
although one might expect them to be realised elsewhere, has not only been
discussed as a strategy which native speakers employ to make interaction more
transparent when dealing with non-native speakers. It has also been found to be
frequently used in interactions among native speakers. (1993) discusses
movement towards the left of a sentence, and differentiates between leftdislocation
and hanging topic, which she claims to assume different interactional
functions. Formally, both usually involve repetition of the moved
constituent by a coreferential pro-form in the main sentence.
11Other forms which do not involve the use of a co-referential proform have
been discussed by (1981). She identifies forms of fronting in which the
information contained in the fronted part has either been evoked in the
preceding discourse (such as Macadamia nuts I can’t afford)
12 or concerns anattribute of an entity that had been salient in the preceding discourse (
Macadamianuts I think they’re called
, where the entity “Macadamia nuts” is noticeablein the speakers’ previous interaction). Another form, which she labels “Yiddish
movement”, since it seems to be used by speakers with a Yiddish background
only, apparently does not follow any particular constraint but is rhetorically
motivated (e.g. Macadamia nuts I yet have to buy).
In my corpus, topicalisation is a strategy which is encountered with both
more and less competent speakers, and it can be observed in the form of
fronting, dislocation, and “Yiddish movement”. As examples (25–30) reveal,
topicalisation occurs across all groups of speakers. It was found in speakers at all
levels of competence and also in speakers of various linguistic backgrounds.
Also, there is a broad range of elements which were fronted, though mostly
fronting involved NPs as in (25), where three years has been moved to the front
of the sentence.
(25) Three years you have to do. (Pakistan, competent)
(26) These day win the outstanding player, when they are playing. (Zaire,
competent)
(27) Difficult culture, ours is. (Pakistan, competent)
(28) My unit, it’s not that special, you see. (Malaysia, competent)
(29) Because me, I have difficulties to understand. (France, less competent)
(30) From today … I have time. (Korean, less competent)
The different types of topicalisation have been found to be used with quite
different frequencies among English mother tongue speakers in Britain. Corpus
analyses have revealed that whereas left-dislocation is common in informal
conversation, fronting rarely occurs (1999). On the other hand, left-
dislocation and fronting has been identified as a feature characterising most
New Englishes. For example,(1997) states that L2 South African Black
English is characterised by frequent instances of all sorts of topicalisation
phenomena. Fronting is also common in pidgins
(1995). The fact that topicalisation occurs frequently in my corpus can
probably be attributed to two different facts. On the one hand, it reflects the
varieties which individual speakers bring into the conversations. At the same
time, it is indicative of the participants’ attempts to make discourse processing
easier by “removing [Discourse-new entities] from a syntactic position
disfavored for Discourse-new entities” ( 1997).
8. Conclusion
The above discussions have demonstrated that, at the informal level, ELF is a
syntactically heterogeneous form of English which is characterised by:
– overwhelming correspondence to the rules of L1 Englishes
– transfer phenomena, developmental patterns and nativised forms
– simplification, regularisation and levelling processes.
The last-mentioned processes indicate that the interaction of different international
lects involves processes which have already been documented for
situations of dialect contact and dialect mixture in individual regions and for
particular languages, as I have pointed out above. Furthermore, the resulting
formof English resembles what (1991:65) points out with reference to
African New Englishes: “the basic grammatical system of Standard English is
retained but certain additions, omissions or modifications are made, often in a
very logical and sometimes even less irregular way than in Standard English.”
However, the additions, omissions and modifications documented for the
interactions inmy corpus are not as systematic and stable as in the case of local,
indigenised Englishes, which involve “acquiring relatively consistent, fixed local
norms of usage which are adhered to by all speakers”
(1994). Thus, ELF differs from the New Englishes which, to qualify as such,
as (2002) points out, require a certain stability or systematicity of
features. The interactions discussed in this paper do not reveal this stability.
Rather, the data is indicative of a transitional form of English. Such forms
have not only been found with contact across English dialects. (1999)
identifies individual stages a variety goes through during its development
towards a New English: an exonormative, an expansion and an endonormative
phase. She finds that some of these phases are characterised by instability as
much as are the phases involved in the process of koinéisation. It thus might well
be that ELF never achieves a stable or even standardised form, just as dialect
contact or contact between English and local languages has not always resulted
in a new stable variety. Evidence from further corpora and their analyses is
required to confirm the tendencies documented for the data discussed in this
paper, and to determine whether ELF is characterised by similar features across
corpora and, thus, across speakers and beyond individual situations.
Given the diversity of features and processes observable in the interactions,
ELF cannot be conceived to be what (1994) has called “World
Standard Auxiliary English”, since it emerges out of and through interaction.
Neither is it a “World Standard Spoken English”, which (1997) claims
people would slip into when faced with the need to communicate with people
from other countries in English.