No abstract

This paper considers pronoun omission in different varieties of English. It argues that omitted pronouns simplify structures if their referents are accessible in discourse, which explains the greater frequency of this grammatical feature in high-contact varieties of English, spoken in speech communities with a history of high numbers of second-language users. A corpus study of two high-contact varieties, Indian English and Singapore English, and a low-contact one, British English, is conducted in order to examine the distribution of omitted and overt pronouns. As expected, pronoun omission is more frequent in the high-contact varieties than in British English. Moreover, pronouns are omitted almost exclusively when they have highly accessible referents as antecedents, which is not a conventionalized feature of the grammars of Indian or Singapore English, where overt pronouns are the default choice when referring to antecedents.

Szmrecsanyi et al. (2016) define probabilistic indigenization as the process whereby probabilistic constraints shape variation patterns in different ways, which eventually leads to more heterogeneity in the constraints governing syntactic variation across different varieties of English. The present study extends our knowledge of the heterogeneity of probabilistic grammars by sketching a corpus-based variationist method for calculating the similarity between varieties thereby drawing inspiration from the comparative sociolinguistics literature. Based on linguistic material from the International Corpus of English, we ascertain the degree of regional variability of five probabilistic constraints on the genitive, dative, particle placement and subject pronoun omission alternations across three varieties of English, namely British, Indian and Singapore English. Our results indicate that, of the four alternations under study, the genitive alternation is the most homogeneous one from a regional perspective, followed – in increasing order of heterogeneity – by subject pronoun omission, dative and particle placement alternations. On the basis of these findings, we evaluate claims in the literature according to which the extent of probabilistic indigenization is proportional to the lexical specificity of the syntactic phenomenon under study, a hypothesis that is borne out by our data.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This article deals with pronoun omission in subject position and its connection with subject-verb agreement in Indian English and Singapore English. Agreement morphology has been found to be a predictor and facilitator of pronoun omission cross-linguistically in that it aids in the identification and retrieval of the referents of omitted pronouns. The results of a corpus study partly confirm this trend, since they show that agreement morphology does have a weak facilitating effect in both varieties examined; that is, pronoun omission increases when the subject and the verb agree in person and number. However, this is only true for lexical verbs; non-modal auxiliaries (i.e., be, have, do), on the contrary, show a low percentage of omitted pronouns and no facilitating effect of agreement morphology. To account for this finding, the possible inhibiting effect on pronoun omission of the frequency of co-occurrence of pronouns and non-modal auxiliaries was also explored.

The aim of the present paper is to test the claim that contact simplifies language (cf. Kusters, 2008) by comparing the domain of relative clause formation in British English, a L1 variety, and Indian English, a L2 variety. According to Hawkins (1999), the processing cost of relativizing a noun phrase increases down the Accessibility Hierarchy (Subject > Direct Object> Indirect Object > Oblique > Genitive> Object of Comparison) proposed by Keenan and Comrie (1977). Subject relative clauses are thus easier to process than direct object relatives, and so on. The results of a corpus study of the British and Indian components of the International Corpus of English show that the Accessibility Hierarchy has an indirect effect on the production of relative clauses in British English and Indian English: whereas the distribution of relative clauses with respect to the hierarchy is very similar in both varieties, the number of complex relatives, i.e., with coordination or further embedding, decreases in the lower positions in Indian English. These results thus suggest that language contact plays a significant role in relative clause use and accounts for certain differences between L1 and L2 varieties of English in this grammatical domain.