Sandra Götz

Non-Canonical Syntax in South Asian Varieties of English: A Corpus-Based Pilot Study on Fronting

Abstract In the present paper, I present a pilot study on fronting in six South Asian Varieties of English, i.e. Indian English (IndE), Bangladeshi English (BgE), Sri Lankan English (SLE), Nepali English (NpE) and Pakistani English (PkE) as compared to their historical input variety, i.e. British English (BrE). For each of these varieties, based on the South Asian Varieties of English (SAVE) newspaper corpus and the news section of the British National Corpus, 500 sentences per variety were manually parsed and the sentence-initial elements were annotated for their information status. Methodologically, I apply regression and CART classification tree analysis to test for variety-specific as well as universal features of fronting in SAVEs. The analysis reveals that constituents are mainly likely to be fronted when the information they represent is given (regardless of variety). Within this category, there are also clear variety-specific differences between IndE, PkE, SLE and BdE on the one hand (showing a generally higher frequency of object fronting), and BrE, MdE and NpE on the other (with a higher frequency of fronted adjuncts).

Common ground across globalized English varieties: A multivariate exploration of mental predicates in World Englishes

Abstract This study tests for similarities and differences in the uses of near-synonymous mental predicates by speakers of different ENL and ESL speech communities to capture whether, and if so to what degree, speakers of different first and second language English varieties use the four near-synonymous predicates semantically differently. Specifically, we focus on I believe, I think, I suppose and I guess in eight native and second-language varieties of English (i.e. American, British, Canadian, Irish, Hong Kong, Indian, Singapore and New Zealand). We adopt a multivariate modeling approach to analyze mental predicates annotated for six semantic variables (verifiability, epistemic mode, epistemic class, epistemic type, evaluation and negotiability) as well as genre. Our findings show the usefulness of exploring Englishes through the lens of semantic structure. Although, on the surface, two groups of English varieties emerge with different preferential patterns of predicates (British, Indian, Irish and Singapore vs. Canadian, Hong Kong and American), at a more abstract level, those predicates share similar semantic combinatory patterns common to all varieties in focus. It emerges that modeling the development of Englishes based on theoretical frameworks that account for simultaneous development of generic (i.e. common to all Englishes) and specialized (i.e. specific to individual Englishes) linguistic patterns may be beneficial. At a time when English has become a worldwide language shaped by globalization, the present study adds to the discussion on the developmental pathways that characterize the evolution of non-native Englishes in the twenty-first century.