Section 2. Grammar workout

Identify and correct errors involving subject-verb agreement

The experimental site, islands off Noumea in New Caledonia, (is remote from any human activity/are remote from any human activity/remote from any human activity/both are remote from any human activity).

Contrary to the results of the experiment (fresh water prove to be intensively concentrated/fresh water proves to be intensively concentrated/fresh waters are intensively concentrated/prove fresh water is to be intensively concentrated) in the middle of the island rather than on its edges(that is the usual zones/which are the usual zones/it are the usual zones/there are the usual zones) of sea water-freshwater interaction.

Complementary (analyses/analysis) derived from dialect study findings (have revealed/is revealed/are revealed)the importance of on-site research.

The density of the vowel changes and the greater degree of consonant development

(is maximal in London suburbs area/are maximal in London suburbs area/it is maximal in London suburbs area/they are maximal in London suburbs area).

On the area margins(the phenomenon is observed/are observed the phenomenon/there are the phenomenon/it is the phenomenon), with mixture of phonetic variables.

A number of special conditions (is/are) necessary for the phonetic change sources to form.

There (is/are) two types of urban dialects in England.

Two years (is/are) a long time when you have to wait.

The number of trees in the National Park is not great.

Each of the students (is/are) to submit their papers.

No news (is/are) good news.

The President along with his advisers (is/are) expected to arrive in an hour.

Unit 1-22. THE USE OF ESP IN EUROPEAN BUSINESS

Section 1. Guidelines for reading texts on the use of international English in European business

ESP makes considerable use of recurrent formulaic patterns of words or formulas. It is estimated that about half of written English text is constructed according to the idiom principle. Comparisons of written and spoken corpora suggest that formulas are even more frequent in spoken language. Formulaic language covers a range of prefabricated linguistic units from idioms and proverbs to speech act routines, turns of phrase and collocations. All of these are considered not to be creatively strung together, each time anew, following the rules of the language, but to be retrieved (by the speaker) and processed (by the hearer), which allows them to depart to various degrees from their predictable meanings. Speakers’ displays of identity and of alignment with particular groups provide one especially promising direction for hypothesis formation in this respect. Istvan Kecskes’ researchdescribes useful formulaic sequences for ESP speech. It determines ESP instructors’ evaluations of their pedagogical importance. It summarizes experiments which show that different aspects of formulaicity affect the accuracy and fluency of processing of these formulas in advanced L2 learners of English.

Text 1-22. FORMULAIC LANGUAGE

(Based on Istvan Kecskes’ research “Formulaic language in English Lingua Franca”)

Objectives

The focus of this paper is the use of formulaic language in English Lingua Franca (ELF). The conversation in Example 1 demonstrates a frequent problem occurring in lingua franca communication in which the language in use is not the L1 of either speaker:

Example 1:

Chinese student: – I think Peter drank a bit too much at the party yesterday.

Turkish student: – Eh, tell me about it. He always drinks much.

Chinese student: – When we arrived he drank beer. Then Mary brought him some vodka. Later he drank some wine. Oh, too much.

Turkish student: – Why are you telling me this? I was there.

Chinese student: – Yes, but you told me to tell you about it.

One of the nonnative speakers used a formulaic expression in a nativelike way. However, the other nonnative speaker was not familiar with the conventional connotation of the expression. For him the most salient meaning of the formula was its literal meaning, its combinatorial meaning. This discrepancy in processing led to misunderstanding between the speakers.

Recently English Lingua Franca communication has been receiving increasing attention in language research. Globalization has changed the world and the way we use language. With English being the most frequently used lingua franca much communication happens without the participation of native speakers of English. The development and use of English as a lingua franca is probably the most radical and controversial approach to emerge in recent years, as David Graddol (2006) claimed in his book English Next. The book argues that it is an inevitable trend in the use of global English that fewer interactions now involve a native speaker, and that as the English-speaking world becomes less formal, and more democratic, the myth of a standard language becomes more difficult to maintain. Graddol claims that in this new world the presence of native speakers hinders rather than supports communication. In organizations where English has become the corporate language, meetings sometimes go more smoothly when no native speakers are present. Globally, the same kind of thing may be happening on a larger scale. Understanding how non-native speakers use English talking to other non-native speakers has now become an important research area. The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) project, led by Barbara Seidlhofer, is creating a computer corpus of lingua franca interactions, which is intended to help linguists understand ELF better. Although several studies have been published on the use of ELF (e.g., House 2002, 2003; Meierkord 1998, 2000; Knapp and Meierkord 2002; Firth 1996; Seidlhofer 2004), our knowledge about this particular variety of English is still quite limited.

What makes lingua franca communication unique is that interlocutors usually speak different first languages and belong to different cultures but use a common language that has its own socio-cultural background and preferred ways of saying things. So it is essential to ask two questions:

1. With no native speakers participating in the language game how much will the players stick to the original rules of the game?

2. Can current pragmatic theories explain this type of communication in which basic concepts such as common ground, mutual knowledge, cooperation, and relevance gain new meaning?

Second language researchers have worked out several different tools and methods to measure language proficiency and fluency. In the center of all these procedures stand grammatical correctness and pragmatic appropriateness. There is no room here to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches. Let’s just say that if we want to learn how much lingua franca speakers stick to the original rules of the language game, we will need to find out something about their thought processes and linguistic conventions as reflected in their language use. What are the possible means for this? First of all, people belonging to a particular speech community have preferred ways of saying things (cf. Wray 2002) and preferred ways of organizing thoughts. Preferred ways of saying things are generally reflected in the use of formulaic language and figurative language while preferred ways of organizing thoughts can be detected through analyzing, for instance, the use of subordinate conjunctions, clauses and discourse markers. This paper will focus on the use of formulaic language in ELF to answer the two questions above.

The formulaic continuum

By formulaic language we usually mean multi-word collocations which are stored and retrieved holistically rather than being generated de novo with each use. Collocations, fixed expressions, lexical metaphors, idioms and situation-bound utterances can all be considered as examples of formulaic language in which word strings occurring together tend to convey holistic meanings that are either more than the sum of the individual parts, or else diverge significantly from a literal, or word-for-word meaning and operate as a single semantic unit.

Certain language sequences have conventionalized meanings which are used in predictable situations. This functional aspect, however, is different in nature in each type of fixed expression, which justifies the hypothesis of a continuum that contains grammatical units (for instance: be going to) on the left, fixed semantic units (cf. as a matter of fact; suffice it to say) in the middle and pragmatic expressions (such as situation-bound utterances: welcome aboard; help yourself) on the right.

Table 1.Formulaic Continuum

The more we move to the right on the functional continuum the wider the gap seems to become between compositional meaning and actual situational meaning. Language development often results in a change of function, i.e., a right to left or left to right movement of a linguistic unit on the continuum. Lexical items such as “going to” can become grammaticalized, or lexical phrases may lose their compositionality and develop an “institutionalized” function, such as I’ll talk to you later, How are you doing?, Welcome aboard, and the like. Speech formulas such as you know, not bad, that’s all right are similar to situation-bound utterances (SBU). The difference between them is that while SBUs are usually tied to particular speech situations, speech formulas can be used anywhere in the communication process where the speakers find them appropriate.

Corpus studies have broadened the scope of formulaic expressions.

Researchers working with large corpora talk about formulaic sequences that are defined by Wray (2002) as: “a formulaic sequence [is] a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar.” Based on this definition much of human language is formulaic rather than freely generated. I did not follow this definition in this study, and concentrated only on fixed expressions that are usually motivated and allow relatively few structural changes (fixed semantic units, speech formulas, phrasal verbs, idioms and situation-bound utterances). I ignored collocations such as if you say…; this is good…; I have been…, etc., which are frequent in the database but hardly fit into the groups given in the table.

Current linguistic models emphasize combinatorial creativity as the central property of human language. Although formulaic language has been mostly overlooked in favor of models of language that center around the rule-governed, systematic nature of language and its use, there is growing evidence that these prefabricated lexical units are integral to first- and second-language acquisition and use, as they are segmented from input and stored as wholes in long-term memory (Wood 2002; Wray 2002; Miller and Weinert 1998). Formulaic expressions are basic to fluent language production.

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