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Volume 47, Issue 1
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Abstract

Abstract

This study investigated nativised structural patterns of light verb constructions (LVCs) in Malaysian English using a corpus-based, descriptive approach to analyse grammatical innovations. To facilitate the analysis, a 100-million-word general corpus comprising threads from Lowyat.Net, a popular Internet forum in Malaysia, was created, and the British National Corpus (BNC) was used as the reference corpus. Using the Sketch Engine corpus tool, the three most frequently occurring LVCs in the Malaysian English corpus were identified. The data was analysed to reveal the differences between the structures of LVC in Malaysian English and its prototypical structure. The findings show that besides the non-isomorphic deverbal noun form, LVCs in Malaysian English prefer taking the basic constituents of an LVC. Nativised LVCs are essentially those with zero articles and isomorphic deverbal nouns taking definite articles, determiners, and descriptive adjectives in their modifier slots. The zero article LVC is the most common nativised structure pattern due to the influence of substrate languages in Malaysian English.

© Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University
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2021-04-19
2023-12-02

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Nativised structural patterns of make light verb construction in Malaysian English
Concentric 47, 93 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1075/consl.00024.rah
/content/journals/10.1075/consl.00024.rah
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): light verb constructions; LVCs; Malaysian English; nativisation; structural pattern; 本土化; 結構模式; 輕動詞結構; 馬來西亞英語

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