Non-native English within the European Parliament

Costanza Cucchi – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Non-native English within the European Parliament

Collana: «Traduzione. Testi e Strumenti»
14,5 x 21 cm – pagg. 134 – 2012 – € 26,00
ISBN 978-88-7916-610-2

SOMMARIO: Introduction — 1. Euro-English and English within the European Parliament: 1.1. Euro-English – 1.2. English within European institutions: The insiders’ view – 1.3. English within the European Parliament: Previous accounts – 1.4. Parliamentary speeches and verbatim reports: Previous accounts – 1.5. Contextual analysis of EU parliamentary speeches and verbatim reports – 1.6. Verbatim reports and the future of multilingualism — 2. Linguistic features of EU parliamentary speeches and verbatim reports: 2.1. The EU-Parl corpus: data and methodology – 2.2. Linguistic features due to speakers’ non-nativeness – 2.3. Linguistic features due to the context of situation — 3. Vague language in speeches and verbatim reports: The case of ‘thing’ and ‘stuff’: 3.1. The importance of being vague – 3.2. Vague nouns: Terminology, forms and functions in previous studies – 3.3. ‘Thing/s’ in EU parliamentary speeches and in verbatim reports – 3.4. ‘Stuff’ in EU parliamentary speeches and in verbatim reports – 3.5. Discussion — Concluding remarks — References.

The volume focuses on non-native English as spoken within the European Parliament, a setting where speakers have the right to express themselves in any of the European official languages. The fact that some speakers opt for English rather than their own mother tongue indicates the increasing use of English in Europe and within the European institutions, a phenomenon which is examined in the volume with reference to the emergence of the term Euro-English. The linguistic analysis of non-native europarliamentary discourse is based on the EU-Parl corpus compiled by the author, which comprises actual speeches delivered by non-native speakers during parliamentary sittings and their corresponding official written proceedings. Findings reveal that non-native speaker discourse is characterised by deviations from Standard English norms and informal traits which one would perhaps not expect, given the formality of the setting. Simultaneously, light is shed on the practice of English mother tongue revisers who draw up the written proceedings. The use of the vague nouns «thing» and «stuff», traditionally associated with the informality expected by native speakers in conversational settings, is then studied in the institutional setting of the European Parliament and in the written proceedings. The book is of interest for a variety of readers, ranging from those interested in English as a lingua franca, to those interested in the differences between speech and writing and the use of vague language in professional and institutional domains.

Costanza Cucchi has a PhD in Applied Linguistics and Communication and is a Tenured Researcher in English Language and Translation at the Faculty of Linguistic and Literary Studies at the Catholic University of Milan. Her current research interests concern language and national identity, the use of English as a lingua franca in Europe and vague language.

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