ON INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE USAGE BY SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The present paper discusses language change in contemporary English with regard to recently introduced inclusive expressions and the problem of activating their usage. For students of English as a foreign language, or even speakers whose L1 is English, what may cause certain problems in activating inclusive language is not only the question of being unsure about the correct expression but also being unsure about the syntactic and semantic structure of inclusive forms or expressions. In order to gain a better insight into some of the forms activated, two corpora of 159 responses by students will be compared and assessed in terms of inclusive equivalents provided for six sentences. In terms of the linguistic forms suggested in e.g., codes of practice, it could be proposed that inclusive language is likely to be more easily encoded in the future due to an increasing exposure to digital text online.