Typological markedness in Ukrainian students’ ELF production
Typological markedness in Ukrainian students’ ELF production

Summary/Abstract: This paper employs Eckman’s (2008) Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) for the study of pronunciation in academic English as a lingua franca (ELF) performance. Its objective was to explain some regular features of Ukrainian students’ ELF, focusing upon the differences between Ukrainian and English marked and unmarked consonant structures. The ELF production of consonant variables was analyzed for 27 students on the basis of their performance in a series of unprepared reading tasks. It is argued that voice contrasts cause much difficulty for Ukrainian students because of semantically marked voice discrimination in obstruents in English. As a result, they transformed English marked structures into less marked ones in their native language. No intelligibility problems were caused, however, by the semantically unmarked articulation position variables. The analysis also showed that the students’ pronunciation demonstrated a traditional, norm-bound trend of sticking to standard native-speaker models in teaching English as a foreign language in Ukraine.

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