On some syntactic properties of non-native written English
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Achieving absolute proficiency in a foreign language is virtually impossible, although a very high degree of identity and linguistic appropriateness are often attained by trained FL professionals, by people who need the foreign language for daily communication in international companies and institutions and by people living, working or studying for a long time abroad. Apart from evident language errors and mistakes, occurrence of which tends to decrease with the growing mastery of the foreign language, there also occur such deviations from the native norm which fall within the boundaries of grammatical and stylistic acceptability, but reveal the non-native status of writers or speakers. The deviations may be e.g. in pronunciation, choices of lexis, determiners, tense and aspect, or appropriate syntactic constructions. The latter area is worth deeper interest, as despite the quite strict and seemingly simple rules of English syntax, their application sometimes leads to a lack of naturally sounding expression where the natively produced language offers more variants. The overapplication of canonical syntactic rules can be illustrated by tendency to place predicates invariably after noun phrases functioning as subjects in all declarative sentences, to overuse the construction there is/are in presentation-type clauses and to avoid split constructions, especially in long noun phrases. The paper considers such deviations as a possible interference of Czech, since the investigated corpus consists of texts by Czech writers, but the same deviations are likely to be produced by users of English who are native speakers of other languages. |