A morphosyntactic approach to language contact in African varieties of English

“I Regret Lying" vs. “I Regret that I Lied": Variation in the Clausal Complementation Profile of REGRET in American and British English

“…Secondly, the findings contribute to the existing literature on non-categorical variation in clausal complementation and the intra-linguistic factors determining the speaker's choice between multiple possibilities (Heyvaert and Cuyckens 2010;Bernaisch 2013;Cuyckens et al 2014;Deshors 2015;Deshors and Gries 2016;Romasanta 2017Romasanta , 2019Romasanta , 2021aRomasanta , 2021b. Third, from a methodological perspective the study shows that a combination of qualitative work (the detailed manual pruning and selection of valid examples) and quantitative analysis (binary logistic regression modeling) is necessary to obtain reliable results.…”

“…As Schneider points out, "in the process of structural nativization, verbs begin to allow and later prefer new structures to complement them and build a complete sentence " (2007: 86). This includes outer-circle languages, already addressed in García-Castro (2018, 2019, 2020 and Romasanta (2017Romasanta ( , 2019Romasanta ( , 2021aRomasanta ( , 2021b, expanding-circle varieties, and learner varieties, where cognitive factors derived from language contact in multilingual settings and second language acquisition are likely to pay a role in clausal complement choice.…”

“…Whereas non-finite patterns seem to have a semantically dependent distribution, the alternation between finite that-clauses and non-finite -ing clauses is noncategorical or probabilistic (Heyvaert and Cuyckens 2010;Cuyckens et al 2014;Romasanta 2017Romasanta , 2019Romasanta , 2021aRomasanta , 2021b. That is, speakers' choices between the two structures seem to be motivated by factors other than meaning.…”

“…The greater number of words in GloWbE allows us to study low-frequency structures, as is the case with clausal complementation (Davies 2012: 162), as well as low-frequency lexical items such as regret (Romasanta 2021a). Another reason for the selection of this corpus is its inclusion of numerous varieties of English from around the world, which have already been the focus of research and will continue to be so (see, for example, Romasanta 2017Romasanta , 2019Romasanta , 2021aRomasanta , 2021b.…”

“…This article is an attempt to contribute to existing research by looking at the complementation profile of regret, a verb that has been shown to exhibit variation between finite that-clauses and non-finite -ing clauses in earlier periods of English (Heyvaert and Cuyckens 2010;Cuyckens et al 2014;Romasanta 2017Romasanta , 2019Romasanta , 2021aRomasanta , 2021b. In particular, I aim to explore differences in the alternation between that-and -ing complement clauses with the verb regret in American English (AmE) and British English (BrE), as in the examples shown in (1) below, as well as the factors that may influence a speaker's choice of one pattern over the other, as attested in data from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE;Davies 2013).…”