The present paper investigates the emergence of local norms in Indian English at the level of verb complementation, an area which so far has not attracted much attention in research into New Englishes. In attempting to describe the verb-complementational profile of Indian English, we offer a pilot study which combines a descriptive aim and a methodological aim. At the descriptive level, the present article focuses on ditransitive verbs and their complementation and addresses two related questions: (1) To what extent do the frequency and distribution of complementation patterns of specific ditransitive verbs (e.g.give) differ between Indian English and British English? (2) To what extent is the basic ditransitive pattern with two object noun phrases (e.g. inhe sent Mary his warmest wishes) associated with different verbs in British English and Indian English? The present paper reveals that in both regards there are clear and identifiable differences in verb complementation between the two varieties. At the methodological level, this pilot study combines the use of balanced and representative subcorpora from the International Corpus of English (ICE) with the in-depth analysis of a much larger database that has been extracted from the Internet archive of the daily Indian newspaperThe Statesman. This makes it possible to also detect examples of low-frequency constructions in Indian English, e.g. sporadic cases of ditransitive complementation of verbs such asadvise,giftandimpart.
In research into New Englishes, it has been suggested that English has turned into a genuinely pluricentric language in the late 20th century and that various regionally relevant norm-developing centres have emerged that exert an influence on the formation and development of the English language in neighbouring areas. In the present paper, we focus on Indian English (IndE), the largest institutionalised second-language variety of English, and its potential role as an emerging epicentre in South Asia. Specifically, we are interested in determining to what extent IndE as the dominant variety in the region shapes the norms in Standard(ising) Englishes in the neighbouring countries. The data for a case study on light verb constructions were retrieved from large web-derived corpora with texts from national English-medium newspapers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lankacountries that all once formed part of the British colonial empire in South Asia and that have retained the English language as a communicative vehicle, albeit to different extents. Our insights from web-derived corpora open up new perspectives for the description of the closeness and distance between Indian English on the one hand and English in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka on the other.
The present paper investigates the strength of verb-construction associations across various New Englishes on the basis of comparable corpora. In contrast to previous studies into verb complementation in New Englishes, we start off from three basic constructions in English — the intransitive, the monotransitive and the ditransitive construction — and analyse the co-occurrences of the three constructions and a wide range of verbs. The present study is based on the Hong Kong, the Indian, and the Singapore components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) because the three varieties represent markedly different stages in the process of the evolution of New Englishes with British English as the historical input variety. Our quantitative analysis includes multiple distinctive collexeme analyses for the different varieties. The results show,inter alia, that, firstly, processes of structural nativisation of New Englishes can also be observed at the level of verb-construction associations, which can be subsumed under the notion of “collostructional nativisation”, and that, secondly, there are identifiable intervarietal differences between British English and New Englishes as well as between individual New Englishes. In general, there is a correlation between the evolutionary stage of a New English variety and its collostructional nativisation: The more advanced a New English variety is in the developmental cycle, the more dissimilar its collostructional preferences are to British English.
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