Pronoun omission in high-contact varieties of English

Abstract

This paper considers pronoun omission in different varieties of English. It argues that omitted pronouns simplify structures if their referents are accessible in discourse, which explains the greater frequency of this grammatical feature in high-contact varieties of English, spoken in speech communities with a history of high numbers of second-language users. A corpus study of two high-contact varieties, Indian English and Singapore English, and a low-contact one, British English, is conducted in order to examine the distribution of omitted and overt pronouns. As expected, pronoun omission is more frequent in the high-contact varieties than in British English. Moreover, pronouns are omitted almost exclusively when they have highly accessible referents as antecedents, which is not a conventionalized feature of the grammars of Indian or Singapore English, where overt pronouns are the default choice when referring to antecedents.

Global Syntactic Variation in Seven Languages: Toward a Computational Dialectology

“…Even though these international languages have global speech communities, dialectology and sociolinguistics continue to focus largely on sub-national dialects, often within so-called inner-circle varieties (Kachru, 1982). This paper joins recent work in taking a global approach by using geo-referenced texts (Goldhahn et al, 2012;Davies and Fuchs, 2015;Donoso and Sanchez, 2017) to represent national varieties (Szmrecsanyi et al, 2016;Calle-Martin and Romero-Barranco, 2017;Cook and Brinton, 2017;Rangel et al, 2017;Dunn, 2018aDunn, , 2019bTamaredo, 2018). The basic point is that in order to represent regional variation as a complete system, dialectometry must take a global perspective.…”

“…Most previous work relies on phonetic or phonological features (Kretzschmar, 1992 , 1996 ; Heeringa, 2004 ; Labov et al, 2005 ; Nerbonne, 2006 , 2009 ; Grieve et al, 2011 , 2013 ; Wieling and Nerbonne, 2011 , 2015 ; Grieve, 2013 ; Nerbonne and Kretzschmar, 2013 ; Kretzschmar et al, 2014 ; Kruger and van Rooy, 2018 ) for the simple reason that phonetic representations are relatively straight-forward: a vowel is a vowel and the measurements are the same across varieties and languages. Previous work on syntactic variation has focused on either (i) an incomplete set of language-specific variants, ranging from only a few features to hundreds (Sanders, 2007 , 2010 ; Szmrecsanyi, 2009 , 2013 , 2014 ; Grieve, 2011 , 2012 , 2016 ; Collins, 2012 ; Schilk and Schaub, 2016 ; Szmrecsanyi et al, 2016 ; Calle-Martin and Romero-Barranco, 2017 ; Grafmiller and Szmrecsanyi, 2018 ; Tamaredo, 2018 ) or (ii) language-independent representations such as function words (Argamon and Koppel, 2013 ) or sequences of part-of-speech labels (Hirst and Feiguina, 2007 ; Kroon et al, 2018 ). This forces a choice between either an ad hoc and incomplete syntactic representation or a reproducible but indirect syntactic representation.…”

Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in English Using Dialect Classification

“…In spite of the global character of English, dialectology and sociolinguistics continue to focus largely on sub-national dialects of En-glish within so-called inner-circle varieties (for example, Labov, et al, 2016;Strelluf, 2016;Schreier, 2016;Clark & Watson, 2016). This paper joins recent work in taking a global approach by using geo-referenced texts to represent national varieties (e.g., Dunn, 2018c;Tamaredo, 2018;Calle-Martin & Romero-Barranco, 2017;Szmrecsanyi, et al, 2016;Sanders, 2010Sanders, , 2007c.f., Davies & Fuchs, 2015). For example, this study of dialect classification contains inner-circle (Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, United States), outer-circle (India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Philippines, Pakistan, South Africa), and expanding-circle (Switzerland, Portugual) varieties together in a single model.…”

Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in

“…In spite of the global character of English, dialectology and sociolinguistics continue to focus largely on sub-national dialects of En-glish within so-called inner-circle varieties (for example , Labov, et al, 2016;Strelluf, 2016;Schreier, 2016;Clark & Watson, 2016). This paper joins recent work in taking a global approach by using geo-referenced texts to represent national varieties (e.g., Dunn, 2018c;Tamaredo, 2018;Calle-Martin & Romero-Barranco, 2017;Szmrecsanyi, et al, 2016;Sanders, 2010Sanders, , 2007 c.f., Davies & Fuchs, 2015). For example, this study of dialect classification contains inner-circle (Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, United States), outer-circle (India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Philippines, Pakistan, South Africa), and expanding-circle (Switzerland, Portugual) varieties together in a single model.…”