The Gift of the Gap: A Study of Dutch and Swedish Learners' Use of the English Zero Relativizer

Olofsson, Arne

doi:10.1080/00138380902796722

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Ball 1996;Suárez-Gómez 2008). Studies of relativisation in non-native speakers' language use are rarer (Durham 2007;Flanigan and Inal 1996;Kiss-Gulyás 2004;Olofsson 2009aOlofsson , 2009b. They tend to focus on the written work of "learners" and are therefore deeply rooted in the ELT research tradition, which describes learners' linguistic output (rather negatively) as "interlanguage".…”

Section: Relativisation In European Elfmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…The North Germanic languages Danish, Norwegian and Swedish behave in a similar fashion to English with respect to gapping as a relativisation strategy (Olofsson 2009a;Platzack 2002: 83). Another similarity is that they allow preposition stranding, which is uncommon in other European languages (Kurzová 1981: 101;Zifonun 2001: 52).…”

Section: Relativisers and L1 Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 97%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A typologically based view on relativisation in English as a European lingua franca

Motschenbacher

2013

European Journal of Applied Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study intends to shed light on the internal linguistic hybridity of English as a European lingua franca. Based on typological considerations relating to Europeanness, it explores the heterogeneity exhibited by relativisation practices in European ELF talk. An overview of central theoretical aspects in research on the status of English in Europe highlights the tension between work thatinspired by the Kachruvian World Englishes framework -aims at studying structural features to test the plausibility of "Euro-English" as a variety and work that places a stronger focus on functional aspects of ELF -a research strand that has gained much greater momentum in recent years. The empirical part presents an in-depth study of relativisation in European ELF, using data from Eurovision Song Contest press conferences. The analysis tests the impact of six variables on relativiser choice quantitatively: syntactic function of relativiser, humanness of antecedent, L1 background, active speaker participation, European region and EU status. Relativisation practices of European ELF speakers turn out to be subject to a whole range of influences that contest the notion of a Euro-English variety. The results rather suggest a processual conceptualisation of variation as influenced by competing linguistic ideologies and document the presence of European prototypicality effects.Keywords: English as a lingua franca, Europe, relativisation, language typology, hybridity Zusammenfassung: Die vorliegende Untersuchung verfolgt das Ziel, die interne sprachliche Hybridität des Englischen als europäischer Linga Franca zu beschreiben. In Anlehnung an sprachtypologische Überlegungen zu europäischer Typizität wird die Heterogenität in Augenschein genommen, die sich in den Relativisierungspraktiken europäischer ELF-SprecherInnen manifestiert. Ein Überblick über theoretische Diskussionen zum Status des Englischen in Europa fördert die Spannung zwischen zwei Hauptströmungen zutage: zum einen Forschung in der Tradition des Kachruschen World Englishes Paradigmas, die sich mit strukturellen Merkmalen befasst, um die Plausibilität des "Euro-Englischen" als Varietät zu testen; und zum anderen Studien, die sich stärker auf funktionale Aspekte des Englischen als Lingua Franca konzentrieren -eine Forschungsrichtung, die in den letzten Jahren stark an Bedeutung gewonnen hat. Im empirischen Teil wird eine Detailstudie zur Relativisierung im Englischen als europäischer Lingua In order to counter the claim that the spread of English in Europe constitutes an example of Anglophone linguistic imperialism (see, for example, Phillipson 1992), House (2003 has used the distinction between "languages of identification" and "languages of communication" (originally taken from Hüllen 1992) to explain that English is not a killer language that ousts other European languages. According to her, a speaker's L1 serves as a language of ethnic/national identification. English as a foreign language, on the other hand, generally fulfils the pragmatic function of communicating with ...

show abstract

Section: Relativisation In European Elfmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Relativisers and L1 Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 97%

A typologically based view on relativisation in English as a European lingua franca

Motschenbacher

2013

European Journal of Applied Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Herriman (2009) discovered that we was overused by Swedish learners, especially when making use of positive face strategies, emphasizing what they and their readers have in common. Olofsson (2009) compares German, Italian and Swedish learners in the use of the zero relativizer and finds that the German learners differ from the other two groups. More generally, Metsä-Ketelä (2007) focuses on the vagueness of learner language, describing how non-native learners with various L1s use the vague expression more or less in international settings.…”

Section: Foreign Language Skills: Listening Speaking and Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Review of recent applied linguistics research in Finland and Sweden, with specific reference to foreign language learning and teaching

Ringbom¹

2012

Lang. Teach.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This review covers recent applied linguistic research in Finland and Sweden during the years 2006–2011, with particular emphasis on foreign language learning and teaching. Its primary aim is to inform the international research community on the type of research that is going on in these countries. Special attention is given to topics which have attracted a lot of interest in the area: language immersion schools and CLIL, cross-linguistic influence, corpus linguistics (English as a lingua franca) and language use in multilingual urban settings.

show abstract

That’s hard

Lester

2019

IJLCR

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Language learners are highly sensitive to statistical patterns in the input. When a target language provides the option to include or omit a grammatical form, learners have been shown to make decisions quite similar to native speakers. For example, learners opt to include or omit the complementizer that (as in I know (that) Steffi likes hot tea). This phenomenon has been explained in terms of a universal suite of cognitive mechanisms which support native and learner performance alike. Both learners and native speakers choose to include the complementizer when they are producing more complex or unexpected structures. The present study attempts to generalize these findings to another domain of “optional” grammatical markers, namely, relativizers (as in the hot tea (that) Steffi likes). I analyze all instances of optional relativizer use in a corpus of spontaneous learner speech produced by Spanish and German learners of English. Both of these languages have obligatory relativizers. A two-step generalized additive regression modeling technique (MuPDAR) that predicts learner choices based on native-speaker choices demonstrates that native speakers use greater shares of the relativizer in complex and disfluent environments, while learners show the exact opposite tendency: they prefer to drop the relativizer in complex and disfluent environments. These findings are discussed based on differences between complementizers and relativizers, and in terms of the limited universality of optional grammatical marking in learner speech.

show abstract

The Gift of the Gap: A Study of Dutch and Swedish Learners' Use of the English Zero Relativizer

Abstract: The absence of a connecting word . . . is a syntactic feature sharply differentiating English from Dutch. 1 A relative pronoun [in English] can be omitted in the same way as in Swedish. 2 Background and Aim

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

A typologically based view on relativisation in English as a European lingua franca

A typologically based view on relativisation in English as a European lingua franca

Review of recent applied linguistics research in Finland and Sweden, with specific reference to foreign language learning and teaching

That’s hard

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About