On 20 November Professor Dagmar Deuber, from the University of Münster (Germany), gave a four-hour seminar entitled English in the Caribbean and beyond: Corpora, perception studies and models in World Englishes research. Attended by under and postgraduate students as well as researcher and Department staff, this seminar drew on current research on English in the Caribbean – specifically, the island of Trinidad – that is being conducted at the Chair of Variation Linguistics at the University of Münster to illustrate and discuss a number of general aspects that are of current relevance in the field of World Englishes research, both at a methodological and a theoretical level.
The seminar covered a wide range of perspectives, including synchronic and diachronic variation as well as various linguistic levels ranging from grammar to accent. Methodologically it illustrated the benefits of extending the currently available range of corpora for New Englishes and showed how corpus and perception studies can be fruitfully combined. On a theoretical level, Prof. Deuber discussed implications for current thinking concerning language and globalization as well as for current models of World Englishes; furthermore, she introduced the notion of translocality as an integrative concept for cross-boundary sociolinguistic phenomena as are becoming increasingly common in today’s world. The seminar was structured into three main parts: (i) A diachronic study of the language of the language of the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian (ii) The “globalization of vernacular variation” meets Creole: quotative be like in Trinidad and (iii) Standard English in Trinidad, multinormativity, and translocality: Implications for the Dynamic Model and the Extra- and Intra-Territorial Forces Model. This seminar was funded by the Departament of Filoloxía Inglesa, Francesa e Alemá, the research group LVTC (Ref. ED431C 2017/50), and the research Project ViEW (Ref. FFI2014-53930-P).