Empirical perspectives on two potential epicenters: The genitive alternation in Asian Englishes

Abstract

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

A corpus-linguistic account of the history of the genitive alternation in Singapore English

“…With complementary British English datasets from the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. via adapting the methodology put forward in Gries & Bernaisch 2016or Heller, Bernaisch & Gries 2017 for synchronic regional varieties to diachronic scenarios), studies to come will be in a position to show specifically for Singapore English whether its progress from phase 3 (nativization) to phase 4 (endonormative stabilization) in the 1970s (cf. Schneider 2007: 155) is indeed marked by an increase in structural distinctiveness and -more generally -whether postcolonial Englishes structurally converge with or diverge from their historical input variety as social and sociolinguistic configurations historically re-adjust.…”

“…In addition, the logic of this has also been used to explore similarities between indigenized varieties and to determine epicenter status in cases where multiple candidate varieties are available (see Gries & Bernaisch 2016;Heller, Bernaisch & Gries 2017). In this paper, we are using the MuPDAR approach to explore Singaporean English and its emancipation/nativization from British English; as the vehicle of our analysis, we are using the genitive alternation exemplified in (1), i.e.…”

An empirical perspective on the contact between English and French: a case study on substitutive complex prepositions

“…Such a question can take the shape of a statistical procedure that seeks to model the deviation of English from the French model in probabilistic terms. Such a procedure, called multifactorial deviation analysis with regression/random forests, hereafter MuPDAR(F), has been applied successfully in learner corpus research to determine how and why choices made by nonnative speakers differ from those made by native speakers (Gries and Adelman 2014;Deshors and Gries 2016;Wulff et al 2018),⁴ but also to explore cross-varietal differences in syntactic alternations (Heller et al 2017), and was adapted for the purpose of this study as follows: 1) model the English speakers' choice between in lieu of and in place of in terms of probabilities of occurrence, using random forests; 2) model the French speakers' choice between au lieu de and à la place de in the same way; 3) apply the French model on the English data, assuming constructional correspondence between au lieu de and in lieu of as well as between à la place de and in place of, and retrieve the probabilities of au lieu de and à la place de for the English data; 4) compute a deviation score (DEV) on the basis of a reference construction, so that P(à la place de) -P(in place of ) = DEV; 5) explore the deviations visually and qualitatively.…”

Corpus-Based Approaches to World Englishes

“…Hoffmann et al 2011;Biewer 2015) does not normally go beyond testing for relative structural closeness of the varieties in question, that is, it provides indirect evidence of potential epicenter status. Gries and Bernaisch (2016) and Heller et al (2017) use two well-tried alternations (the dative alternation with GIVE and the genitive alternation) and Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis with Regression (MuPDAR) to argue that underlying patterns of usage are sufficient to test epicenter status. According to their data, this can be supported for IndE in South Asia but not for SingE in Southeast Asia.…”