Is It Or Is It Not Interlanguage? A Head-On Confrontation with Non-Native English.

Deviation for native-speaker norms in non-native varieties of English are often regarded as interlanguage features which must either be weeded out through teaching or which the learner will eventually abandon as his competency moves in the direction of the target language. It is argued in this paper that some deviations are motivated by style, even though they may reflect first language-influence. To support this argument the language of university students in Ghana was analyzed with emphasis on instances of coordination which break grammatical rules. The conclusion reached is that coordination is not an interlanguage feature in Ghanaian English, but rather different types of coordination are used to signal varying levels of formality in social interaction. This paper goes on to draw some implications of this conclusion. (Contains 18 references.) (Author)