Joybrato Mukherjee

Steady states in the evolution of new englishes : Present-day Indian English as an equilibrium

The evolutionary model of New Englishes offered by Schneider posits a uniform pattern of five diachronic phases that are assumed to underlie the processes inherent in the emergence of all New Englishes worldwide. The present article applies this evolutionary model to Indian English and argues on the basis of linguistic and sociolinguistic evidence that present-day Indian English is best viewed as a phase 4 variety, marked by endonormative stabilization, in which, however, some features of phase 3 (i.e., nativization) coexist. It is suggested that the situation in which Indian English finds itself today could be seen as a stable, productive steady state in the evolutionary process in which there is an equilibrium between conflicting forces of progression and conservativism. This steady state in the diachronic development is linked to the synchronic view of present-day Indian English as a semiautonomous variety, which is characterized by three major determinants: common core, interference, and autonomy.

Indian English An Emerging Epicentre? A Pilot Study on Light Verbs in Web-derived Corpora of South Asian Englishes

Abstract In research into New Englishes, it has been suggested that English has turned into a genuinely pluricentric language in the late 20th century and that various regionally relevant norm-developing centres have emerged that exert an influence on the formation and development of the English language in neighbouring areas. In the present paper, we focus on Indian English (IndE), the largest institutionalised second-language variety of English, and its potential role as an emerging epicentre in South Asia. Specifically, we are interested in determining to what extent IndE as the dominant variety in the region shapes the norms in Standard(ising) Englishes in the neighbouring countries. The data for a case study on light verb constructions were retrieved from large web-derived corpora with texts from national English-medium newspapers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka countries that all once formed part of the British colonial empire in South Asia and that have retained the English language as a communicative vehicle, albeit to different extents. Our insights from web-derived corpora open up new perspectives for the description of the closeness and distance between Indian English on the one hand and English in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka on the other.

The Style of Pop Song Lyrics: A Corpus-linguistic Pilot Study

Abstract In the present paper, we discuss the analytic potential of corpus-linguistic research into the genre of pop song lyrics. More specifically, we are interested in a corpus-based description of the general style of and, potentially, the stylistic variation within the genre of pop song lyrics. To this end, we envisage the compilation, annotation and analysis of a large and representative corpus of pop song lyrics, the Giessen-Bonn Corpus of Popular Music (GBoP). In the present paper, we report on general findings from a pilot investigation of the pilot version of GBoP. The focus here is on the identification of style markers of pop song lyrics in general and on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the vocabulary and of lexicogrammatical routines in the corpus. Finally, we will also discuss the extent to which GBoP may help to shed light on metaphors that are typical of pop song lyrics.

Complementation of ditransitive verbs in South Asian Englishes: a multifactorial analysis

Abstract This paper examines parallels and differences between South Asian Englishes and British English with regard to various factors driving the selection of verb-complementation patterns. Focusing on the prototypical ditransitive verb give and its complementation, we use large web-derived corpora and distinguish between two possible response cases, one based on the dative and prepositional construction (i.e. the dative alternation), the other including monotransitive complementation. Our data has been additionally coded for a number of potential driving factors, such as pronominality and discourse accessibility of the participants in the constructions. Applying a model-exploration technique we isolate the main driving factors for the varieties under scrutiny (Indian English, Pakistani English and British English) and analyze their influence on pattern selection based on a multinomial logistic regression formulation. Our findings show that, while there is a large area of overlap between the varieties, Pakistani English is closer to British English with regard to relevant driving factors than Indian English. Furthermore, we reveal interesting parallels between all three varieties in the use of monotransitive complementation.

Corpus data in a usage-based cognitive grammar

The present paper is intended to bridge the long-established gap between corpus-based research into actual language use on the one hand and cognitive models of the abstract language system (in terms of speaker’s ‘competence’) on the other. For this purpose, a very useful, non-generative framework is provided by Langacker’s usage-based cognitive grammar. In general, the consideration of corpus data in cognitive grammar leads to an innovative and realistic model of speakers’ linguistic knowledge, i.e. a model which is data-oriented and frequency-based, functionalist and lexicogrammatical in nature. This theoretical from-corpus-to-cognition approach will be illustrated by discussing corpus data on the use of the ditransitive verb GIVE and by sketching out how the data may be included in a truly usage-based model of the lexicogrammar of GIVE.

The state of the art in corpus linguistics: three book-length perspectives

Susan Hunston , Corpora in applied linguistics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hardback £40.00, ISBN 0 521 80171 0. Paperback £14.95, ISBN 0 521 80583 X. Pp. xii + 241. Charles F. Meyer , English corpus linguistics: an introduction . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hardback £45.00, ISBN 0 521 80879 0. Paperback £16.95, ISBN 0 521 00490 X. Pp. xvi + 168. Gerald Nelson, Sean Wallis, and Bas Aarts , Exploring natural language: working with the British component of the International Corpus of English . Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Hardback £95.00, ISBN 90 272 4888 5. Paperback £55.00, ISBN 90 272 4889 3. Pp. xviii + 342.

Syntax and Semantics at Tone Unit Boundaries

Abstract The relationship between syntax and prosody has spawned a vast literature over the last years. In the present paper, we particularly capitalise on the corpus-linguistic model of talk units as suggested by Halford (1996) and elaborated further by Esser (1998) and Mukherjee (2001). A major tenet of this model is the assumption that the boundaries of contour-defined tone units are usually syntactically motivated and that prosody and syntax can thus be shown to interact at these boundaries: it is here that the speaker signals various degrees of completeness or incompleteness of the utterance ‘so far’ to the hearer. This results in different degrees of expectancies on the part of the hearer. In the present paper, the relevance of the tone unit boundary as an ‘expectancy-relevance place’ is discussed in a wider setting. In particular, we provide data from a corpus-based experiment and an in-depth functional analysis which reveal that a variety of syntactic and semantic factors come into play at tone unit boundaries.

Highly polysemous verbs in New Englishes: A corpus-based pilot study of Sri Lankan and Indian English

The analysis of New Englishes has spawned a vast amount of literature over the past few decades. Linguistic research into new postcolonial Englishes extends to aspects of both structural nativization at all linguistic levels (i.e. the emergence of local forms and structures of English) and language functions as well as speaker attitudes. Within the area of structural nativization, processes of semantic acculturations of the English language to new socio-cultural contexts have also been described, including, for example, meaning shifts of individual lexical items (cf. Nihalani et al. 2004) and the emergence of culturally motivated collocational patterns (cf. e.g. Ooi 2000). What has so far been neglected, however, is a corpus-based and quantitative approach to gradual changes in meaning preferences of polysemous lexical items. Inspired by Gilquin’s (2008) innovative approach to highly polysemous high-frequency verbs in American English, the present paper reports on the results of a comparative corpus-based pilot study of the two verbs give and take in two New Englishes, i.e. Indian English and Sri Lankan English, and their historical input variety, i.e. British English.

Corpus linguistics and English reference grammars

The present paper begins with a discussion of major conceptual and methodological differences between the new Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CamGr), the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (CGEL), and the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE). The different approaches in the three grammars are associated with different extents to which corpus data come into play in the grammars at hand. The present paper argues that, for various reasons, the combination of CGEL and LGSWE provides a first important step towards genuinely corpus-based reference grammars in that a theoretically eclectic descriptive apparatus of English grammar is complemented by qualitative and quantitative insights from corpus data. However, there are several areas in which future corpus-based grammars need to be optimised, especially with regard to the transparency of corpus design and corpus analysis and the balance between a language-as-a-whole and a genre-specific description.

English in South Asia – Ambinormative Orientations and the Role of Corpora: The State of the Debate in Sri Lanka

In South Asia, just as in all other postcolonial contexts with emergent institutionalised second-language varieties of English, speakers’ orientations towards standards and their attitudes to norms represent a controversial issue. In the present chapter, I will discuss the complexity of such ambinormative orientationsin present-day Sri Lanka, where the issue of standards and norms is currently a hotly debated topic for various reasons, especially because of the general lack of codification and on account of the publication of the first dictionary of Sri Lankan English, as well as the recently launched Government Initiative English as a Life Skillwith its focus on Indian models for English language teaching in Sri Lanka. Against this background, I will also argue in the present chapter that the compilation and analysis of large-scale corpora of South Asian varieties of English can provide a useful reference point and input for the on-going debate on standards and norms in Sri Lanka.