The dative alternation in South Asian English(es)

Abstract

The present paper focuses on the modelling of cross-varietal differences and similarities in South Asian English(es) and British English at the level of verb complementation. Specifically, we analyse the dative alternation with GIVE, i.e. the alternation between the double-object construction (John gave Mary a book) and the prepositional dative (John gave a book to Mary) as well as their passivised constructions with regard to the factors that potentially exert an influence on this alternation in seven varieties of English. The South Asian varieties under scrutiny are Bangladeshi English, Indian English, Maldivian English, Nepali English, Pakistani English and Sri Lankan English, while British English serves as the reference variety. The patterns of GIVE are annotated according to the following parameters including potential predictors of the dative alternation: syntactic pattern and semantic class of GIVE; syntactic complexity, animacy, discourse accessibility and pronominality of constituents (cf. Gries 2003b; Bresnan and Hay 2008). The choices of complementation patterns are then statistically modelled using conditional inference trees and a random-forest analysis.The results indicate that many of the predictors found to be relevant in British English are at play in the South Asian varieties, too. The syntactic pattern of GIVE is, in descending order, uniformly influenced by the predictors pronominality of recipient, length of recipient, semantic class of GIVE and length of patient. Interestingly, the predictor country is marginal in accounting for the dative alternation of GIVE across the varieties at hand. Based on this observation, we derive variety-independent protostructions, i.e. abstract combinations of (cross-varietally stable) features with high predictive power for a particular syntactic pattern, which we argue to be part of the lexicogrammatical “common core” (Quirket al. 1985: 16) of English.The implications of the present paper are twofold. While the order of the predictors regarding their influence on the dative alternation is clearly compatible with earlier studies (cf. e.g. Green 1974; Ransom 1979; Hawkins 1994; Gries 2003b), the stability of the order across varieties of English calls for a) a more fine-grained gradation of linguistic forms and structures at the lexis-grammar interface as indicators of structural nativisation and b) a revision of earlier verb-complementational findings specific to individual or groups of varieties of South Asian English.

Attitudes towards Englishes in India

“…on the predictors of the dative alternation, cf. Schilk et al 2013;Bernaisch et al 2014) tend to show cross-varietal similarities (cf. Gries & Mukherjee 2010: 537f).…”

The pragmatic nativisation of pauses in Asian Englishes

“…While conditional inference trees are relatively easy to construct, can handle missing data and provide excellent visualisations of the model results, it is – particularly with the data of the present study – conducive to complement the results of the conditional inference tree with a generalised linear mixed‐effects model. Sometimes, conditional inference trees miss important interactions (Bernaisch, Gries, & Mukherjee, , pp. 14f.)…”

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

“…Given the inapplicability of regression modeling to our data, we are here using random forests in place of regressions; in particular, we are using the implementation in the R package randomForest (Liaw and Wiener 2015, version 4.6-12). As for the interpretation of the results, we are following Bernaisch, Gries and Mukherjee (2014) and Deshors and Gries (2016): we compute predicted probabilities for all cases and then report averages for each combination of the predictor VARIETY and each other predictor. While this is a heuristic in how the resulting plots do not control for the effects of all other predictors at the same time, the above studies have used this successfully and comparisons of such plots with corresponding effects plots of regressions have been very encouraging.…”