English World-Wide - Volume 38, Issue 1, 2017

Sentential complementation is generally unmarked in Chinese Pidgin English (ChnP). However, around the middle of the 19th century, the word so began to be used as a complementizer. This paper focuses on the origins of so as a complementizer in ChnP. An examination of so and another closely related expression so fashion (‘so, like this’) shows that their meanings and functions can largely be attributed to the corresponding expressions in the source languages, namely Cantonese gam2 (‘so, like this’) and English so in its anaphoric function. As Cantonese gam2 and English so are not complementizers, it is hypothesized that so-complementation is the result of reanalysis by which the anaphoric so is reinterpreted as a complementizer. It is further argued that the emergence of so-complementation is facilitated by a common grammaticalization pathway whereby deictic expressions acquire grammatical functions such as that of complementizer.

This study gives an overview of the merger of the dress and trap vowels before laterals, which occurs for some speakers of Australian English in the state of Victoria (in the south-east of the country), as well as in some other varieties of English. Research on this phenomenon in Australian English has been preliminary to date, but has uncovered some general tendencies in distribution, as well as possible motivators for actuation and spread of the change. The aim of this paper is to describe and orient the phenomenon in the context of English worldwide, and while we work with some illustrative experimental data, our aim is not to provide a detailed quantitative sociophonetic perspective here. This paper further aims to illustrate the extent of the variability seen in the Australian English community with respect to ongoing change.

The Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creoles (AECs) exhibit fascinating combinations of disparate typological characteristics. I present a model of post-formative (“post-creolization”) contact and change and provide a comprehensive inventory of contact constellations in Africa and the Caribbean. I conduct a comparative analysis of causative constructions in seven African and Caribbean AECs, argue for the notional separation of the traditional creolist terms “superstrate”, “lexifier”, “substrate” and “adstrate”, and account for the linguistic-structural relevance of these distinctions. The model can explain the typological diversity within and across the AECs, help elucidate their genealogical and areal differentiation, and contribute to our understanding of the processes and outcomes of language contact and change in multilingual ecologies.

In British Standard English, number in the verb phrase is exclusively characterized by the use of the -s inflection with the third person singular present tense. World Englishes present a high level of variation as the uninflected third person singular and the inflected third person plural may also occur in these contexts. This paper pursues four objectives: a) to analyse the use of present third person inflections and compare their distribution in different varieties of English; b) to assess the occurrence of forms across speech and writing, text categories and the informants’ age and gender; c) to classify the instances by type of subject (nominal vs. pronominal); and d) to evaluate the impact of proximity agreement, notional agreement and the existence of intervening elements in the choice of the inflection. Our evidence comes from the New Zealand, Indian, Singaporean and Hong Kong components of the International Corpus of English.