PRODUCTION PRINCIPLES IN NON-NATIVE INSTITUTIONALIZED VARIETIES OF ENGLISH

This study investigates the production of three groups of speakers: speakers of Singapore English, native speakers of English, and second language learners of English in the United States and introduces, as an acquisitional phenomenon, non-native institutionalized varieties of English (NIVEs). NIVEs are spoken in those nations previously under British colonial administration which maintain English in some official capacity. Because they are institutionalized, NIVEs have preserved many of the developmental features thought to be characteristic of individual learner languages. However, unlike learner varieties, NIVEs are relatively stable, and thus more accessible to investigation.

Production, rather than acquisition, is the force of this research. Unguided conversations between six pairs of speakers in each group were audio-taped and an attempt was made to determine whether any principles guide the production of all the speaker groups. Two such principles are proposed. The first promotes economy of production through the reduction of irregularity and redundancy. Hyperclarity, the second principle, maximizes salience and minimizes ambiguity. The speech of the three groups is analyzed in light of both.

Two specific areas of production are explored: (1) questions, where it was found that all subjects frequently sought to maintain canonical word order and to reduce or eliminate semantically redundant elements from their production, and (2) expressions of anaphoric reference, where when topics or referents were difficult to recover because of distance or ambiguity, heavily marked expressions were used. Where referents were easily reconstructed, little or no marking was used.

The effects of the principles of economy of production and hyperclarity were apparent in the production of all three speaker groups. These findings underscore the importance of including native speaker base line data in studies of non-native speaker production and indicate that in production at the level of discourse, there are significant similarities between native and non-native speakers.