English as a Lingua Franca: A Corpus-based Analysis 9781474212175, 9780826497758

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Acknowledgements

,My heartfelt thanks to Kiveli for her infinite and selfless support though this long and seemingly endless journey. This Ithaca, poor though it is, I dedicate to her, with love. My gratitude and love to Michael, Antony and Rosa for putting up with my physical and emotional absences for so long. To Antony a special thanks for his prompt and effective help with the computer. My appreciation to Michael McCarthy and Ron Carter for their support and inspiration in so many ways over the years. How to thank the 42 SUES who must remain anonymous, and without whom there would be no book? Thanks, too, to the other interlocutors who contributed to the 200,000-word corpus and without whom there would be no SUEs. A special thanks to the 100 ELT professionals and ordinary L1- and L2users who patiently ploughed through the lengthy SUE Test and gave me their comments beyond the call of duty. .My gratitude also goes to the 400 teachers, applied linguists and common or garden L l and L2-users who responded to the bump into test; my apologies for deceiving them as to the mother-tongue of the speaker of the bump into utterance. Thanks also to the 50 members of BAAL who supplied me with anecdotes relating to unilateral idiomaticity. Many colleagues gave me additional support by providing me with feedback, articles and references, in spite of their busy schedules. Thanks go to: Svenja Adolphs, Dave Allan, Suzanne Antonaros, Alicia Artusi, Gulfem Aslan, Jim Arnold, Mike Burghall, Martin Bygate, Alicia Cabrero, Bob Chatel, Bessie Dendrinos, Julian Edge, Gwyneth Fox, Kathleen Hart, Gerard Hocmard, Janet Holmes, Angelka Ignjacevic, Sue Jones, Agnes LesznyGk, Peter Medgyes, Myriam Monterrubio, Christiane Meierkord, Gerhard Finster, Sara Hannam, Juliane House, Jennifer Jenkins, Dasos Loizou, Alexander Nikolaou, Anne 07Keeffe, Elissavet Koutoupi, John Liontas, Alan Maley, Dionisia Pappatheodorou, Graeme Porte, Enric Llurda, Trevor Phillips, Odysseus Prodromou, Penelope Prodromou, Alan Pulverness, Mario Rinvolucri, Paula Jullian Romani, Deirdre Ryan, Michael Rundell, Mario Saraceni, Norbert

Prologue

Articulation is the tongue-tied's fighting ('On Not Being Milton', Harrison 1984: 1121

Nowadays, when people ask me if I am a 'native speaker' of English, I reply, 'I don't know.' I used to think I was a 'native speaker', but after researching English as a lingua franca I am not sure any more. My mother tongue is a dialect of Greek that I no longer remember. Greek Cypriot dialect was the first language I ever heard, in Cyprus where I was born. My parents emigrated to Birmingham, England, when I was 3 years old. In this new environment, I was immersed in English from primary school onwards, and very quickly as English became my first language. As immersion in English increased and I moved away from home, the little I knew of my 'mother tongue' faded and has now virtually disappeared. I cannot remember ever speaking in Greek to my siblings. I have since acquired standard Greek, from my wife, with whom I used English as a lingua franca when we first met; we gradually adopted Greek as a lingua franca, which we now interlace with bits of English on a daily basis. My mother, unlike her seven children, never learned much English. She arrived in England as a young adult, but ended up living in her adopted country, isolated from members of the surrounding speech community, working long hours in the fish and chip shop we ran in Birmingham. The local Brummies used to make fun of her heavily accented broken English sentences when they came into the shop to buy their cod and chips and a pickled onion. She couldn't really answer them back, as she had never learnt more than a few fragments of English; she remained tongue-tied, as far as English was concerned. My father spoke a bit more English because he worked in factories and I remember him reading the Daily Mirror, like his fellow workers. All seven children acquired Standard English as well as a good deal of Brummie dialect and most went on to study at university. They acquired enough linguistic capital to make the most of the opportunities English had given them. Thus, our parents' objective in moving to England in the first place - to give their children access to a good education and a profession - was fulfilled.

1

Corpora: what have they uncovered?

Shallow:

Bardolph:

'Better accommodated!' it is good; yea indeed, is it: good phrases are surely and ever were, very commendable. Accommodated ... very good; a good phrase. Pardon me, sir; I have heard the word. 'Phrase,' call you it? By this good day, I know not the phrase; but I will maintain the word with my sword to be a soldier-like word, and a word of exceeding good command, by heaven. (Henry IV, 2. Act 3, scene 2: 28ff)

1.1 The origins of this study In 1995, I attended my first conference lecture about corpus linguistics and, in retrospect, it was a kind of 'pedagogic epiphany'. The occasion was the annual TESOL Conference in Athens and it was probably the first time the largely Greek audience, myself included, had heard anything about corpus linguistics. The speaker referred to a new kind of grammar that no Greek teacher, with their penchant for teaching grammar to their exam-stressed students, had ever heard of before: 'spoken grammar'. The speaker went on to outline the fascinating insights that corpus linguistics had uncovered about 'spoken grammar' and how this grammar differed from traditional grammars. The audience scribbled notes eagerly on the 'new grammar', which called all in doubt, thirsty for unknown aspects of English with which to prepare their students for the ubiquitous Cambridge exams: back-channelling, discourse markers, situational ellipsis, delexical verbs, hedging and vague language, 'heads and tails' and the more familiar territory of fixed expressions and idioms. Little did they suspect that these obscure linguistic terms had come to undermine their most cherished beliefs about the English language: the certainty of rules; the difference between right and wrong sentences. The conference speaker argued that the main difference between corpusinformed teaching and traditional teaching is that in the past we have relied on the relatively fixed nature of grammatical rules, based on writing, whereas spoken corpora have uncovered lexico-grammatical patterns characterized more by probabilities than certainties. In 'spoken grammar', rules are rarely

3

The idiomatic puzzle

Lexical chunks: a gap poem What I'd like to demonstrate today. Here and 1 , all things being 2-, And time waiting for no 3 : Is to explain, and, at this point in 4 , Without further 5 , it might be appropriate To reflect on the matter in 6-, In other words, so to 7 , what I mean by this, without Jumping on any specific 8-, And please feel 9 to Contradict me, as I've often said, And I think this is particularly Relevant, indeed I could Go on about it at some lo-. At the end of the 1 1 , despite All appearances to the 12Life is not always a bowl of 13-. Antoinette Pulverness Moses

3.0 Introduction: The idiomatic puzzle

In previous chapters, we have identified the paradoxical status of idiomaticity in the description of English: for corpus linguistics, it is at the heart of spoken grammar and fluency; for ELF scholars on the other hand it is 'irrelevant' and indeed an obstacle to mutual intelligibility. In this chapter, I look at the research into idiomaticity in so far as it affects second language acquisition. I will begin by taking a personal view of idiomaticky in my own experience as a learner and as a teacher. My experience of English from childhood has left a trail of broken idioms leading to an idiomatic puzzle: why d o certain aspects of phraseology seem to be the Achilles' heel even of highly successful L2-users of English?

40

ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA

As I was acquiring English from the age of 3 as the child of immigrants to the UK, I heard countless idiomatic expressions: many became part of my active linguistic repertoire, some I understand but would never use, and some are still a mystery to me. As a teacher, I have seen at first hand the invisible idiomatic barrier that seems to erect itself before even the most advanced students. Outside the classroom, I noticed the slips that even competent users made tended to be in the area of collocation. Cambridge Proficiency candidates produced grammatically flawless compositions, marred only by misplaced and often hilarious colourful idioms, added to impress the 'native-speaker' examiner. I remember my highly advanced post-Proficiency student who asked me to focus on 'idioms' and I remember the moment of revelation when she produced 'Luke, your bottom is up' from my carefully explained model of 'bottoms up!' I recall countless movie subtitles in Greek where the only errors in an otherwise perfect translation of the English screenplay were in the area of everyday idiomatic expressions. I have read PhD theses by expert L2-users where in 100,000 words of 'native-like' English the only difference from the 'native' variety of English was the use of non-canonical collocations. I was intrigued by the curious review of the novel When We Were Orphans, which claimed to detect a problem of idiomaticity in the writer's style: 'Ishiguro's avoidance of phrasal verbs is a major problem ...' (Hensher 2000). The author of the novel, Kazuo Ishiguro, a Booker Prize winner, was, like myself, the child of immigrant parents and had settled in the UK at the age of 5. I recalled the way the 'non-native speaker' is often presented in literature for humorous effect as someone who gets English idioms wrong: '"Top of the delightful morning, esteemed sahib," murmured Hurree Jamset Ram Singh' (Richards 1948: 194). '"Aha!" said Poirot. "Aha! Mon Dieu! Japp that gives one to think, does it not?" I saw that it has certainly not given Japp to think' (Christie 1974: 7). After living abroad for 30 years, I still feel, even today, that the aspect of my own English which has suffered attrition most is how idiomatic chunks are used (on the symptoms of attrition of long-term residence in another country, see Porte 1999,2003). In an article I submitted to Applied Linguistics the only linguistic error identified by the reviewers was idiomatic: * trying t o get a word in edgeways instead of the canonical he couldn't get a word in edgeways. When I came to learn Spanish, I found that even at an advanced level my nightmare was not the grammar (apart from the subjunctive), but the Spanish idioms my teacher was so keen to teach us. As for Greek, after 30 years of immersion, Greek idioms and collocations are still all Greek to me and, when I use them, a source of hilarity for my Greek friends and bilingual family.