Profiling verb complementation constructions across New Englishes

Abstract

In this paper, we explore verb complementation patterns withtoandingin native English (British and American English) as compared to three Asian Englishes (Hong Kong, Indian, and Singaporean English). Based on data from the International Corpus of English annotated for variables describing the matrix verb and the complement, we run two random forests analyses to determine where the Asian Englishes have developed complementation preferences different from the two native speaker varieties. We find not only a variety of differences between the Asian and the native Englishes, but also that the Asian Englishes are more similar (i.e. ‘better predicted by’) the American English data. Further, as the first study of its kind to extend the MuPDAR approach from the now frequent regression analyses to random forests analysis, this study adds a potentially useful analytical tool to the often messy and skewed observational data corpus linguists need to deal with.

Structuring subjectivity in Asian Englishes

“…This dichotomy is reflected in two ways: (i) in the fact that Figure 2 singles out SingE as the only ESL variety that mirrors native (AmE) usage patterns, and (ii) in the fact that, to some extent, SingE is the only ESL variety that associates strongly with one particular mental predicate, namely suppose. With regard to (i), although this pattern has already recently started to be documented in the ESL literature, to my knowledge, after Deshors & Gries (2016) and Horch (2016), this is only the third study so far to capture this pattern. (I will return to this finding in Section 5 and discuss its implications in the context of Schneider's (2007) evolutionary model of language varieties.…”

“…SingE) would be the least similar to a native variety (particularly BrE as the historical source variety), compared to the less advanced IndE and HKE varieties. Unexpectedly, however, recent studies such as Deshors & Gries (2016) have started to question this emancipation pattern. Focusing on verb complementation constructions, Deshors & Gries (2016) find that, although SingE was expected to be the least similar to native English, the variety resembles AmE more, and IndE/HKE do not resemble any particular native variety.…”

“…Unexpectedly, however, recent studies such as Deshors & Gries (2016) have started to question this emancipation pattern. Focusing on verb complementation constructions, Deshors & Gries (2016) find that, although SingE was expected to be the least similar to native English, the variety resembles AmE more, and IndE/HKE do not resemble any particular native variety. This is a very interesting finding because, while work such as Leimgruber (2011) shows that SingE is undergoing a language shift from (predominantly) second-language to (increasingly) native language, one could envisage that SingE's development is more complex than it may appear.…”

Variation isn’t that hard: Morphosyntactic choice does not predict production difficulty

“…Infinitival versus gerundial complementation. After some head verbs there is a choice between two types of non-finite verbal complements: infinitival complementation, as in (6a), or gerundial complementation, as in (6b) [81][82][83][84]. There are four classes of verbs after which this variation regularly occurs.…”

Structural Nativization in Postcolonial Englishes

“…Bernaisch, Gries & Mukherjee 2014;Gries & Bernaisch 2016;Röthlisberger, Grafmiller & Szmrecsanyi 2017;Szmrecsanyi et al 2016), clausal verbal complementation has barely been investigated at all (although cf. Bernaisch 2015;Deshors 2015;Deshors & Gries 2016;García-Castro 2019, 2020Romasanta 2017;Steger & Schneider 2012). Furthermore, these studies have usually concentrated on existing patterns (an exception being new ditransitive verbs; 1 cf.…”