Advanced non-native English on a continuum of Englishes : Charting new data sources

This presentation discusses research in which the objective is to find new empirical and theoretical ways of approaching the ongoing globalization of English. A particular angle is to test the usability of corpus-based diachronic methods for studying advanced non-native Englishes and to investigate present-day non-native use as one stage in the long continuum of Englishes. Such an approach is motivated by calls from the English as a lingua franca (ELF) domain to provide diachronically-informed evidence of English in multilingual settings (Seildhofer 2011) and by recent attempts in the study of indigenized World Englishes to take into account diachronic processes in shaping the outer circle Englishes (Noel, van Rooy & van der Auwera 2014). In particular, we investigate how ongoing grammatical variability, which is widely documented in many native varieties, is adapted in advanced non-native use. A key question is to investigate to what extent multilingual settings contribute to ongoing variability. The presentation discusses requirements for sources of material and evidence, and its starting point is the fact that the ELF research has so far focused on meaning making in interaction, which is also reflected in the scope of corpus resources. We zoom into ongoing corpus compilation work in which the aim is to collect a representative multi-genre sample of English texts in multilingual settings. The objective is that the sampling frame should enable diachronic and diatopic analyses of advanced nonnative use and make possible quantitative comparisons between our evidence and some of the existing English corpora, both native and non-native. The presentation discusses the diverse nature of our data and presents how we turn the data into evidence. We will introduce the set of grammatical structures, stemming from the corpus material, which have so far been investigated, and discuss a set of broader research questions to which this type of multi-genre corpus material of English texts in multilingual settings could shed more light.