The present paper studies the dative alternation with GIVE, i.e. the alternation between the double-object construction (e.g.John gave Mary a book) and the prepositional dative (e.g.John gave a book to Mary), in relation to the norms underlying this constructional choice in six South Asian Englishes. ViaMultifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis with Regression(MuPDAR) including random effects, we identify (i) factors triggering different constructional choices in South Asian Englishes in comparison to British English and (ii) the linguistic epicentre of English in South Asia with regard to the dative alternation. We are able to show that discourse accessibility of patient and recipient as well as pronominality of recipient are actuators of structural nativisation in South Asian Englishes and — in agreement with a more general sociolinguistic approach — find via a bottom-up approach that Indian English may be regarded as the linguistic epicentre of English for South Asia.

The present study seeks to contribute to two sparsely examined areas of World Englishes research by (i)

Although the study and description of the structural levels of Sri Lankan English as a variety of English in its own right have so far been in the centre of a limited number of small-scale investigations only, the sociolinguistic scenery in Sri Lanka has attracted more national and international scholarly attention. In this context, most of the sociolinguistic studies with a special focus on attitudes towards English in Sri Lanka did not differentiate between attitudes towards individual varieties of English, but conducted their investigations under the umbrella term English in Sri Lanka. Against this background, the present study examines attitudes towards Sri Lankan English, Indian English, British English and American English in Sri Lanka with the help of an attitudinal survey based on bipolar semantic differential scales and correlates the results with relevant metainformation. While the findings of the survey indicate that British English continues to be a variety of English which is highly valued in Sri Lanka, the informants also display a positive attitude towards Sri Lankan English; a finding with conceptual implications regarding variety-status of Sri Lankan English and relevance for future language planning activities in Sri Lanka.

With the help of a survey building on 13 bipolar pairs arranged on a six‐point semantic differential scale, the present paper studies Indian English speakers’ attitudes towards their local variety Indian English contrastively by simultaneously examining their attitudes towards American English, British English and Sri Lankan English. The results show that although Indian speakers of English display a positive attitude towards Indian English, which is most pronounced with the group of young female informants possibly leading an ongoing linguistic change in India, the informants view British English in a more favourable light. In addition, Indian English speakers show the least positive attitude towards Sri Lankan English, which may be an indication of mutual attitudinal demarcation between the two neighbour varieties.

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” (Quirket 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.

No abstract

In this paper, we are exploring the history of the genitive alternation (of-vs. s-genitive) in Singapore English based on corpus data covering both British English (as the historical input variety) and Singapore English (as the target variety whose diachronic development we are interested in). Specifically, while earlier research has produced partly diachronic accounts of genitive variability, the diachronic development of the genitive has so far not been studied in ESL contexts, a gap which this study attempts to fill. Nearly 6000 instances of of-and s-genitives were annotated for a large number of predictors including phonetic variables (e.g. final sibilancy of possessor), semantic variables (e.g. animacy of possessor/possessum), syntactic variables (e.g. length of possessor/possessum), and pragmatic variables (e.g. discourse accessibility of possessor/possessum). We then applied the method of Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis with Regressions/Random Forests to the data to explore (i) how genitive choices in Singapore English differ from those in British English and, after a methodological interlude, (ii) how genitive choices changed over time in Singapore English. We conclude with some important recommendations regarding diachronic studies of structural nativization and their theoretical implications in models such as those of Moag (1982) or Schneider (2003, 2007).

No abstract