I find it fascinating that even on the *corpora* list, the discussion of essentially 
conceptual questions on this topic has outweighed that of empirical ones so 
far. As some contributors have indicated, these issues have been discussed for 
a long time, but surely it is now time to investigate empirically what the most 
salient features of English as a lingua franca might be. 


It may be of interest to some corpora subscribers that I am in the process of 
compiling a corpus of (spoken) ELF (English as a lingua franca) at the 
University of Vienna (with support from Oxford University Press, hence the 
name Vienna-Oxford ELF Corpus). Of course I intend to eventually make the 
corpus available to the scientific community, and I will also post the details of 
the relevant homepage here as soon as possible. 


In the meantime, if anybody is interested in the rationale for it, I have sketched 
this in an article just out in the _International Journal of Applied Linguistics_ 
11/2 entitled 'Closing a conceptual gap: the case for a description of English as 
a lingua franca'.  In this paper I also summarize what (relatively little) empirical 
work has been done on ELF so far, esp. in the areas of phonology and 
pragmatics.

A very detailed study already available for one level of language is Jennifer 
Jenkins'  _The phonology of English as an international language_ (OUP 2000).

And since Europe was specifically mentioned: there are some shorter articles 
(eg by Jennifer Jenkins, myself, and by Juliane House, who is investigating the 
pragmatics of ELF) on the Guardian Weekly website   
http://www.guardianweekly.com/

under the heading '<bold><color><param>0100,0100,0100</param><FontFamily><param>Times New Roman</param><bigger>{HYPERLINK "http://www.guardian.co.uk/GWeekly/Global_English/0,8458,400340,00.html"}</bold><color><param>0000,0000,0000</param><FontFamily><param>Arial</param><smaller>Global English: the European lessons <color><param>0100,0100,0100</param><FontFamily><param>Times New Roman</param><bigger>'.


<FontFamily><param>Arial</param><smaller>Barbara Seidlhofer<FontFamily><param>Times New Roman</param><bigger>



</color><FontFamily><param>Arial</param><smaller>Eric Atwell wrote: ...

<color><param>7F00,0000,0000</param>> Maybe there is scope for a European Corpus of English parallel to the

> British National Corpus, where an object of study might be not "what are

> the deficiencies of learner Engish" but "what are the regional/national

> variations in English as written/spoken across Europe". ...


<bold><color><param>0000,0000,FF00</param>Tadeusz Piotrowski's wrote:</bold></color>

<color><param>7F00,0000,0000</param>> It might be interesting to know what the overlap between different

> non-native varieties is, what the common core is. There must be,

> otherwise all those speakers could not communicate. That common core is

> perhaps the international variety. The international variety was very

> broadly described by Quirk and Gimson in their respective publications.

> I don't know whether somebody followed up.

> Another problem is, what is an error? </color>




Prof. Dr. Barbara Seidlhofer
Institut für Anglistik
Universität Wien
Universitaetcampus AAKH/ Hof 8
Spitalgasse 2-4
A-1090 Vienna, Austria
phone (+431) 4277 424 42
fax (+431) 4277 9424