Compounding and Suffixation in World Englishes

Word formation of Chinese English words: Evidence from the Chinese English Dictionary

“…The former intends to cover the entirety of the lexis of a national variety including regionalisms (e.g., The Macquarie Dictionary , 1981). The latter records only ‘varietal regionalisms’ (Lambert, 2012, p. 11), ‘un‐English lexical exotica’ (Kachru, 1983, p. 166), or ‘variety‐specific’ lexis (Biermeier, 2014, p. 319) which have originated in and are peculiar to a specific linguistic and cultural context, although the peculiarity of some lexical items might have faded as they became assimilated into the common stock of world Englishes (e.g. A Dictionary of Hong Kong English , 2011).…”

“…Substantial literature has come into being on the subject of word formation of new Englishes (Bautista, 1997; Biermeier, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2017; Dako, 2001; Deterding, 2007; Evans, 2015; Tan, 2013; Tent, 2001). A handful of scattered works touched upon the word formation of Chinese English (Cannon, 1988; Moody, 1996; Yang, 2005, 2009) but solely within the framework of linguistic borrowing.…”

“…Lexical innovations that emerged in the historical and contemporary contact between English and indigenous languages have drawn continuous scholarly attention in the paradigm of world Englishes either as embedded sections (or paragraphs) of panoramic monographs aiming at a comprehensive account of new English varieties (Bolton, 2003; Kachru, 1982; Kirkpatrick, 2010; Mesthrie & Bhatt, 2008; Platt, Weber, & Lian, 1984; Schneider, 2007; Seargeant, 2012; Tan, 2013; Xu, 2010) or as independent portraits depicting exclusively the lexical realm (Baumgardner, 1998; Biermeier, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2017; Cannon, 1988; Chan & Kwok, 1985; Evans, 2015; Tan, 2009; Tent, 2001; Yang, 2009). Of all the lexical features that have been delineated, word formation constitutes one of the most essential dimensions of lexis nativization denoting how English phonemes and morphemes came to be localized.…”

Structuring subjectivity in Asian Englishes

“…To date, ESL varieties have rarely been contrasted empirically from a semantic perspective (however, see Werner & Mukherjee 2012 for a corpus-based study on highly polysemous verbs in ESL); and although there are ESL studies focused on lexical phenomena (e.g. Biermeier 2009Biermeier , 2014Callies 2016), those tend to take a morphological perspective and focus on word-formation across ESL varieties. 2 Lexico-semantic variation across ESL varieties is an area that has yet to be explored.…”

On models and modelling

“…His monofactorial study of the two variables shows that there is social and stylistic variation in GhanE, with a clear local usage norm for the phonetic variable and a distribution that reveals exonormative influence from the matrilect for the syntactic variable. Seeing that GhanE is still at the nativization stage, Huber (2014, p. 104) concludes that ‘sociolinguistic variation, hitherto tacitly assumed to be characteristic of fully‐fledged varieties only, has to be expected from early on in the development of a New English, possibly even from the very beginning.’ There is no research so far that attempts to statistically model nativisation at the vocabulary level. For qualitative approaches with a focus on individual variaties, see Van Rooy and Terblanche (2010), Biermeier (2014), Evans (2014, 2015) or Brato (2019, p. 266).…”