Pronoun deletion in Hong Kong English and Colloquial Singaporean English

Abstract

The question how substrate features and extralinguistic conditions interact in shaping contact varieties is an ongoing debate in the study of world Englishes. The present study tries to describe substrate influence by identifying an areally marked morphosyntactic feature, subject pronoun deletion, and comparing its occurrence and structural conditioning in two closely related varieties of English in Southeast Asia. Our results show that even in the typologically similar linguistic habitats of Hong Kong and Singapore, the different degrees of nativisation are reflected in the frequency and distribution of null subjects in the two relevant local varieties.

Syntactic complexity and language contact: A corpus-based study of relative clauses in British English and Indian English

“…For instance, despite the fact that, of all grammatical components, morphology and syntax have been traditionally considered the least vulnerable to the effects of language contact (Thomason and Kauffmann, 1988: 51-52), recent studies (e.g. Mukherjee and Gries, 2009;Schröter and Kortmann, 2016;Suárez-Gómez, 2017) have shown that contact languages or dialects tend to contain grammatical structures that are the result of transfer from one of the languages/dialects involved in the contact situation to the other(s). These innovations introduce new variants in the grammar and, therefore, increase its complexity from a systemic point of view by expanding the set of rules/constructions available.…”

Untitled

“…For instance, despite the fact that, of all grammatical components, morphology and syntax have been traditionally considered the least vulnerable to the effects of language contact (Thomason and Kauffmann, 1988: 51-52), recent studies (e.g. Mukherjee and Gries, 2009;Schröter and Kortmann, 2016;Suárez-Gómez, 2017) have shown that contact languages or dialects tend to contain grammatical structures that are the result of transfer from one of the languages/dialects involved in the contact situation to the other(s). These innovations introduce new variants in the grammar and, therefore, increase its complexity from a systemic point of view by expanding the set of rules/constructions available.…”