25 October 2017
Speaker: Cristina Suárez-Gómez (University of the Balearic Islands)
Title: Language contact and grammatical complexity in the structural nativization of relative clauses in Asian Englishes
Venue and Time: room 3.58 (John Percival Building), 12.10
Abstract:
The aim of this presentation is to examine morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes. Drawing on spoken data from the International Corpus of English, it will explore structural nativization in relative clauses in three varieties of English (India, Hong Kong and Singapore Englishes), which emerged as the consequence of British colonization, developed as varieties through educational systems, and are now consolidating as independent, linguistically different (local) prestige varieties. In addition to the varieties mentioned above, data from British English will be included for comparison. The analysis will show that certain features and structures predominate in specific varieties, and also illustrate constructions which are specific to the Asian varieties under investigation. Finally, the presentation will elucidate the potential factors determining the nativized structures, which can be explained as cross-linguistic tendencies that go beyond the influence of the local language(s), and hence they are further analyzed in light of cognitive determinants of learning, which favour isomorphism and thus aim at maximizing transparency.
Cristina Suárez-Gómez obtained a position as Lecturer in English at the Department of Spanish and Modern and Classical Languages of the University of the Balearic Islands after obtaining her PhD in 2004, where she was promoted to a position as Senior Lecturer (2010). Cristina is part of the research groups “Variation in English World-Wide (ViEW)”, “Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (LVTC)” and the research network English Linguistic Circle (ELC), all of them funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Her main areas of research include: Gibraltar English; Morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes, in particular relativization processes and the expression of the perfect; Compilation of electronic corpora, in particular the ICE Gibraltar corpus; English historical syntax, pragmatics, grammaticalization theory; English dialectal variation from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective and contact Englishes
Webpage: http://view0.webs.uvigo.es/team/cristinasuarez