Cristina Suárez delivers a lecture at the University of Cardiff on relatives in WEs

On 25 October, Cristina Suárez-Gómez delivered a lecture entitled Language contact and grammatical complexity in the structural nativization of relative clauses in Asian Englishes. She was invited by Dr Sara Pons-Sanz,  Senior Lecturer at the School of English, Communication and Philosophy of the University of Cardiff. In her lecture she examined morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes. Drawing on spoken data from the International Corpus of English, she explored structural nativization in relative clauses in three varieties of English (India, Hong Kong and Singapore Englishes), which emerged as the consequence of British colonization, developed as varieties through educational systems, and are now consolidating as independent, linguistically different (local) prestige varieties. In addition to the varieties mentioned above, data from British English were included for comparison. The analysis showed that certain features and structures predominate in specific varieties, and also illustrated constructions which are specific to the Asian varieties under investigation. Finally, the presentation elucidated the potential factors determining the nativized structures, which can be explained as cross-linguistic tendencies that go beyond the influence of the local language(s), and hence they were further analyzed in light of cognitive determinants of learning, which favour isomorphism and thus aim at maximizing transparency.