Elena Salakhyan Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen “The Tübingen Corpus of Eastern European English (TCEEE): From a small-scale corpus study to a newly emerging non-native English variety.”
ABSTRACT
Research in the field of World Englishes aims to pin down, as precisely as possible, the linguistic and pragmatic properties a certain variety displays or does not display. The status of English in the Expanding Circle has been of significant interest in recent years (Berns 1995, 2005; House 2002; Knapp – Meierkord 2002; Jenkins 2007; Sedlhofer – Widdowson 2009, etc.). Nevertheless, the use of English by Slavic speakers in Post-Soviet Space has been largely ignored. Given the typological similarities among the Slavic languages (and similar historical and societal developments in the region) the paper proposes to view the Eastern European English(es) as a variety of English within the Expanding Circle. In particular, the paper questions which morphosemantic patterns, especially those of tense and aspect, emerge in the data. The study draws on spontaneously produced language data of fifteen Slavic speakers of English with L1 Ukrainian, Russian, Polish or Slovak which have been compiled into the Tübingen Corpus of Eastern European English (TCEEE: sixty thousand words). The paper argues that a variety of Eastern European English(es) is indeed emerging and that further studies examining the domains of morphosyntax, morphosemantics and lexis are necessary to provide additional evidence of this development.