Combining learner English and World Englishes perspectives: The case of embedded inversion

The current spread of English as the global language of communication challenges the traditional SLA-based view of English as a foreign language learnt in classroom settings. Consequently, the study of learner English from an SLA perspective should be brought into closer contact with the study of other non-native Englishes, especially indigenized L2 varieties of English (commonly referred to as World Englishes). Despite obvious shared interests between these research fields, attempts to combine their perspectives have not been made until very recently (see, e.g., Mukherjee & Hundt 2011). This paper aims at showing how SLA could benefit from expanding its boundaries so as to include concepts and findings from the fields of variationist and contact linguistics. One such concept is that of Angloversals, that is, commonalities or universals of L2 Englishes, which has become one of the most topical questions in the study of World Englishes (Mair 2003, Kortmann & Szmrecsanyi 2004), but has not yet been properly applied to learner Englishes. Starting from the observation that embedded inversion (EI), i.e. the inversion of SV word order in indirect questions, is a widespread phenomenon in World Englishes (Sand & Kolbe 2010, Hilbert 2011), this paper examines to what extent EI is found in learner Englishes and if its uses parallel those found in World Englishes. Among the investigated variables are the learners’ L1 and the medium of communication (written vs. spoken language). The results, based on data from ICLE (Granger et al. 2009) and LINDSEI (Gilquin et al. 2010), show that EI occurs in learner English, though in smaller proportions than in World Englishes. The use of EI also appears to be governed by similar principles in different types of Englishes (cf. the influence of the L1/substrate language or the role of repeated chunks). This study demonstrates that the theories and findings from variationist and contact linguistics can help gain insight into learner English and open new horizons for SLA