> One version of this discussion was had a few years ago when
> it was seriously proposed---I forget who by--to create a
> corpus of "non- native English"; not a corpus of specific
> Englishes from specific non-native groups (e.g. so as to
> grammar/spell correct the English of French speakers, for
> example, a useful and real task)---but rather some general
> corpus. I think the proposal collapsed under the
> ridiculousness of the idea. I do hope so and that its not out
> there somewhere waiting for users!
You're not referring perhaps to the ever-growing corpus of Learner
English collected by Sylvie Granger and colleagues at Louvain? Not so
ridiculous an idea for people interested in EFL, I think. That corpus is
collected specifically as a source of errors, and each text is of course
identified by the native language of the source, among other things. So
it is simultaneously "a corpus of specific Englishes from specific
non-native groups" and a more "general corpus", so I'm not sure if you
would think it ridiculous or worthy. In any case, what IS clear, from
the perspective of both teaching EFL and correcting non-native English
(we and others called it "interference checking" when we worked on it
many years ago!) is that some learners' errors are due to specific
interference from the native language, and some are more generic,
perhaps due to particular idiosyncrasies or irregularities of English,
no matter what the learner's native language. SO a generic corpus of
learner English would help to identify the latter.
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