Marianne Hundt

New Zealand English grammar fact or fiction? : a corpus-based study in morphosyntactic variation

New Zealand English (NZE) is one of the younger post-colonial varieties of English. It is therefore not surprising that previous research focused on lexical and phonological aspects of NZE and practically neglected grammatical peculiarities. New Zealand English Grammar — Fact or Fiction? presents a careful comparative analysis of parallel corpora of New Zealand, British, American and Australian English in order to single out morphological, syntactic and lexico-grammatical features typical of an emerging New Zealand standard. In addition to corpus data on regional variation, the author uses data on short-term diachronic change within British and American English to show how regional variation is closely related to both stylistic variation (a world-wide colloquialisation of the written norms of English) and ongoing linguistic change leading to temporal regional differences. NZE is different from other national varieties of English in terms of preferences for certain variants rather than categorically different grammatical rules. Nevertheless, it is a standard in its own right in so far as it is a typical mix of variants available in World English. The methodological approach combines both qualitative analyses and statistical evidence. The question in how far statistically significant differences in word frequencies can be shown to be linguistically significant is also relevant for other quantitative research into emerging national standards.

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.

Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse

This volume presents current state-of-the-art discussions in corpus-based linguistic research of the English language. The papers deal with Present-day English, worldwide varieties of English and the history of the English language. A special focus of the volume are studies in the broad field of corpus pragmatics and corpus-based discourse analysis. It includes corpus-based studies of speech acts, conversational routines, referential expressions and thought styles, as well as studies on the lexis, grammar and semantics of English. And it also includes several studies on technical aspects of corpus compilation, fieldwork and parsing.

The Committee Has/Have Decided... On Concord Patterns with Collective Nouns in Inner- and Outer-Circle Varieties of English

Standard English is not a monolithic entity but shows systematic variation in terms of regional or stylistic preferences and ongoing change. The corpus-based approach has been used to study these patterns of variation in a number of so-called inner-circle varieties. Linguists have only recently started to collect data on variation in outer-circle varieties. The cumulative evidence from a number of such studies will eventually allow us to determine whether these varieties are still oriented toward exonormative models or whether they are developing internal (endonormative) models of usage. This article aims to contribute to this field of research by investigating one syntactic variable— concord with collective nouns—in two outer-circle varieties: Singaporean English, which is British-based, and Philippine English, which is American-based. For both varieties, components of the International Corpus of English are examined. The results show that neither Singaporean nor Philippine English patterns exactly like its “parent” variety.

Retrieving relatives from historical data

Variation and change in relativization strategies has been well documented (e.g. Ball 1996: 46, Biber and Clark 2002, Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan 1999, Johansson 2006, Lehmann 2002). Certain types of relative clause, namely that-relatives and zero relatives, were difficult to retrieve from plain-text corpora. Studies therefore either relied on manual extraction of data or a subset of possible relativization strategies. In some text types, however, the zero relative is an important member of the class of possible relativizers. Recent advances in syntactic annotation should have made that-relatives and zero relatives more accessible to automatic retrieval. In this article, we test precision and recall of searches on a modest-sized corpus, i.e. scientific texts from ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers), as a preliminary to future work on the large corpora which are increasingly becoming available. The parser retrieved some false positives and at the same time missed some relevant data. We discuss structural reasons for both kinds of shortcoming as well as the possibilities and limitations of parser adaptation.

The dynamics of inner and outer circle varieties in the South Pacific and East Asia

Southern Hemisphere varieties such as Australian English (AusE) and New Zealand English (NZE) have fairly recently been codified as separate national standard varieties of English. This development may be of some importance for the dynamics of English varieties in the South Pacific and East-Asian region. With increased political, economic and personal contact between Australians and New Zealanders on the one hand and second-language speakers of English in countries such as the Philippines, Singapore or Fiji on the other hand, the latter may start modelling their speech on AusE and NZE rather than on the formerly more prestigious varieties of American and British English. To test this hypothesis, the world wide web was used as a source to compile the SPEA-Corpus ...a collection of articles from on-line newspapers which were chosen to represent the different inner and outer circle varieties in question. The paper describes the compilation of SPEAC and presents the results of a case study ...variation between the present perfect and the past tense. It discusses the results as a first step to modelling the dynamics of inner and outer circle varieties in the South Pacific and East Asia and the suitability of on-line newspapers on the world wide web as a source for corpus compilation.

The Changing English Language: Psycholinguistic Perspectives

Bringing together experts from historical linguistics and psychology, this volume addresses core factors and processes in language change, exploring the potential (and limitations) of such an interdisciplinary approach. Easily accessible chapters by psycholinguists present cuttingedge research on frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acquisition, and develop models of how these may be involved in language change. Each chapter is complemented with one or more case studies in the history of English in which the psycholinguistic factor in question may be argued to have played a decisive role. Thus, for the first time, a single volume provides a platform for an integrated exchange between psycholinguistics and historical linguistics on the question of how language changes over time.

The Ecclesiastes Principle in Language Change

Author(s): Baayen, R Harald; Tomaschek, Fabian; Gahl, Susanne; Ramscar, Michael | Editor(s): Hundt, Marianne; Mollin, Sandra; Pfenniger, Simone E

Home Is Where You’re Born: Negotiating Identity in the Diaspora

Over 20 million Indians do not live in India, either as people of Indian origin (PIOs) or non-resident Indians (NRIs). This paper looks into the double diaspora situation of Indians who are descendants from indentured labourers in the Fiji islands but who, due to the political situation in Fiji, decided to migrate to New Zealand. The data come from a series of interviews conducted with first and second generation Fiji Indians in Wellington, New Zealand. The focus is on the discursive construction of identity in this double diaspora situation, particularly the role that ‘place’ plays in this process. The key concept investigated is that of HOME. Taking a dictionary definition as its starting point, the analysis of the interview data shows that none of the places construed as HOME as part of their identity is unproblematic for the community. In particular, the meaning components ‘ancestral home’, ‘country of origin’ and ‘country of residence’ contribute to the dynamic social realities of different members of the community. The data also reveal that there is an additional meaning component not included in the dictionary definition, namely the idea of the ‘colonial country as cultural home’.

The Demise of the Being to V Construction

This paper revisits a construction that is rare in historical data, namely the combination of being with an infinitive, as in They being to arrive early that afternoon, all necessary preparations had been made. In early and late Modern English, the BE TO construction had a fuller paradigm than it does in Present Day English, where it is (almost) exclusively used in tensed forms. The focus in this paper is on part of the paradigm of the BE TO construction, i.e., instances with a present participle form of be. Relevant neighbouring constructions are being Ving and having to V, but the construction also needs to be discussed against the background of developments in the system of auxiliaries and future time expressions (Denison 1993; Warner 1993; Nesselhauf 2006, 2010). On the basis of evidence from historical text databases and corpora, this paper provides the first detailed description of the syntactic contexts, functions and distribution of the being to V construction. In a next step, corpus data are used to discuss possible reasons (i.e., system dependency, paradigmatic attrition, competition and distributional fragmentation) for its apparent demise. The study thus contributes to the still somewhat underexplored area of syntactic loss.