English World-Wide - Volume 35, Issue 1, 2014

The present paper focuses on the modelling of cross-varietal differences and similarities in South Asian English(es) and British English at the level of verb complementation. Specifically, we analyse the dative alternation with GIVE, i.e. the alternation between the double-object construction (John gave Mary a book) and the prepositional dative (John gave a book to Mary) as well as their passivised constructions with regard to the factors that potentially exert an influence on this alternation in seven varieties of English. The South Asian varieties under scrutiny are Bangladeshi English, Indian English, Maldivian English, Nepali English, Pakistani English and Sri Lankan English, while British English serves as the reference variety. The patterns of GIVE are annotated according to the following parameters including potential predictors of the dative alternation: syntactic pattern and semantic class of GIVE; syntactic complexity, animacy, discourse accessibility and pronominality of constituents (cf. Gries 2003b; Bresnan and Hay 2008). The choices of complementation patterns are then statistically modelled using conditional inference trees and a random-forest analysis.The results indicate that many of the predictors found to be relevant in British English are at play in the South Asian varieties, too. The syntactic pattern of GIVE is, in descending order, uniformly influenced by the predictors pronominality of recipient, length of recipient, semantic class of GIVE and length of patient. Interestingly, the predictor country is marginal in accounting for the dative alternation of GIVE across the varieties at hand. Based on this observation, we derive variety-independent protostructions, i.e. abstract combinations of (cross-varietally stable) features with high predictive power for a particular syntactic pattern, which we argue to be part of the lexicogrammatical “common core” (Quirk et al. 1985: 16) of English.The implications of the present paper are twofold. While the order of the predictors regarding their influence on the dative alternation is clearly compatible with earlier studies (cf. e.g. Green 1974; Ransom 1979; Hawkins 1994; Gries 2003b), the stability of the order across varieties of English calls for a) a more fine-grained gradation of linguistic forms and structures at the lexis-grammar interface as indicators of structural nativisation and b) a revision of earlier verb-complementational findings specific to individual or groups of varieties of South Asian English.

In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), immigrants constitute nearly 90% of the population. Most are adults who come from South Asia and who are ESL users of English. The paper suggests that the English speaking community in the UAE is at the stage of pre-koinéization, one in which there is an increase in transparency with regard to features which are overly complex for ESL speakers. The very small number of children in the immigrant community and the instability of the community are constraints on the process of pre-koinéization, but this paper nevertheless suggests that there are users of acrolectal English who strive for greater transparency, and it provides examples of three ways in which they are doing so. These are through the extension of verb complementation patterns, the extension of patterns of transitivity, and the extension of the pluralization of nouns, and these changes are well documented in postcolonial Englishes (Schneider 2007). The data are drawn from a corpus of 3.3 million words of acrolectal written English.

William Williams (1727–1791) wrote a novel entitled Mr. Penrose: The Journal of Penrose, Seaman about an English sailor marooned on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, partly based on the author’s own experience. Internal linguistic evidence confirms that the castaway’s contact was with the Rama and Miskito Indians of this area. The novel’s 350 printed pages are in the formal English of the times, but also include dialogue in the local vernacular English that was still undergoing creolization. It includes words not only from Rama and Miskito, but also Spanish and African languages and phrases suggesting convergence with modern English Creole structures (“Harry was sick, sick”). This article uses lexical and morphosyntactic data from the 18th-century manuscript to cast light on the origin of synchronic features of Miskito Coast Creole English.

As a relatively new phenomenon in the phonology of Scottish English, TH-fronting has surprised sociolinguists by its rapid spread in the urban heartlands of Scotland. While attempts have been made to understand and model the influence of lexical effects, media effects and frequency effects, far less understood is the role of social identity. Using data collected as part of an ethnographic study of a high school in the south side of Glasgow, Scotland, this article addresses this gap in the literature by considering how TH-fronting is patterned across three all-male, working-class, adolescent Communities of Practice, and how this innovative variant is integrated within a system of the more established variants [θ] and [h]. Drawing on recent work on linguistic variation and social meaning, the article also explores some of the social meanings of (θ), particularly those variants which previous research has reported as being associated with ‘toughness’, and suggests how these meanings are utilised in speakers’ construction of social identity.