124200 SE PhD Seminar Linguistics (2020W)

This is an interactive seminar-type course for students embarking on, or already working on, their 'Dissertation' (PhD thesis) in the area of linguistics.

The notion of the ‘native speaker’ is both crucial and controversial in contemporary linguistics. Coulmas (1981: 1 observes that "linguists of every conceivable theoretical orientation agree that the concept of the native speaker is of fundamental importance for the field ". Although there exists no universally agreed-upon definition of this concept, “the speaker whom the linguist is concerned about is invariably claimed to be a native speaker. He is the one who can legitimately supply data, and his language is what grammatical analyses are meant to account for. Thus, nativeness is the only universally accepted criterion for authenticity” (op.cit.: 5).
Has this state of affairs changed significantly over the last four decades?

What still seems to be the case is that the central role of the native speaker in linguistics is usually so taken for granted that it this not even noticed or explicitly discussed. As the theoretical and descriptive linguist Laurie Bauer observes in a summary statement in 2007: “The native speaker of a language has been given great status by both structuralist and generative linguistics, in both theoretical and applied linguistics. The notion of ‘native speaker’ is highly problematic, though this has largely gone unnoticed.” (Bauer 2007: 76)
It seems odd that scholars should maintain such a strong and unconditional belief in something they can neither define nor agree upon - perhaps particularly with reference to English, the most global of all languages at present. Also in the teaching and testing of English worldwide, what constitutes a valid target is still determined with virtually exclusive reference to native-speaker norms.
At the same time, the relevance of the native-speaker concept has been emphatically called into question with the (relatively) recent emergence of research on World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca.
Since this issue is more or less manifest, and often just ‘dormant’, in any linguistics research project, it should be interesting to focus on it in a PhD seminar with participants working in different areas of linguistics. We will begin by discussing readings from a number of different areas of linguistics/applied linguistics and asking whether and how the ‘native speaker’ figures in them. In the second part of the course, students will be asked to consider the relevance of the notion of the ‘native speaker’ to their specific PhD projects, and to reflect on its applicability (or otherwise) of, and implications for, their own field of research.

Bauer, Laurie 2007. The Linguistic Student’s Handbook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Coulmas, Florian (ed.). 1981. A Festschrift for Native Speaker. The Hague: Mouton.