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

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to test the claim that contact simplifies language (cf. Kusters, 2008) by comparing the domain of relative clause formation in British English, a L1 variety, and Indian English, a L2 variety. According to Hawkins (1999), the processing cost of relativizing a noun phrase increases down the Accessibility Hierarchy (Subject > Direct Object> Indirect Object > Oblique > Genitive> Object of Comparison) proposed by Keenan and Comrie (1977). Subject relative clauses are thus easier to process than direct object relatives, and so on. The results of a corpus study of the British and Indian components of the International Corpus of English show that the Accessibility Hierarchy has an indirect effect on the production of relative clauses in British English and Indian English: whereas the distribution of relative clauses with respect to the hierarchy is very similar in both varieties, the number of complex relatives, i.e., with coordination or further embedding, decreases in the lower positions in Indian English. These results thus suggest that language contact plays a significant role in relative clause use and accounts for certain differences between L1 and L2 varieties of English in this grammatical domain.

Introduzione

“…Il contributo di Fiorentino e Ganfi, Parametri per semplificare l'italiano istituzionale: revisione della letteratura, presenta una revisione ragionata della letteratura sul tema della complessità linguistica nella prospettiva di valutare come essa possa essere trattata e in parte "ridotta" applicando processi di semplificazione in vista di una maggiore comprensibilità dei testi da parte dei lettori (Kusters, 2003(Kusters, , 2008Dahl, 2004Dahl, , 2009Miestamo, 2008;Hawkins, 2004;Tamaredo, 2017). Lo studio ha come obiettivo la costruzione di una lista dei parametri condivisi per la valutazione del diverso impatto di ciascuno di essi sulla leggibilità di un testo.…”