Structural creativity in multilingual countries

On 3 December, Cristina Suárez-Gómez (University of the Balearic Islands) gave a talk at the Faculty of Philology and Translation entitled “Structural creativity in multilingual countries”. In her presentation she examined structural creativity in World Englishes, i.e. varieties of English which have emerged in multilingual countries. Basing the analysis on data from the International Corpus of English, she explored relative clauses in the spoken language of the Englishes spoken in Hong-Kong, India and Singapore. She offered an analysis of a set of structures which diverge from the norm (e.g. deletion of stranded prepositions, as in “The one that I am very interested is the one at do you pronounce as Bifort” ) and examined the potential factors operating in the creation of such structures: essentially, whether they are shaped by transfer from the local languages, or whether they are the result of the development of the contact varieties as L2s.