The dative alternation in South Asian English(es)

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Bernaisch ◽  
Stefan Th. Gries ◽  
Joybrato Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Conditional Inference ◽  
The South ◽  
Double Object ◽  
Indian English ◽  
British English ◽  
Semantic Class ◽  
Dative Alternation ◽  
Syntactic Pattern ◽  
Conditional Inference Trees

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” (Quirk et 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.

Exploring epicentres empirically

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Th. Gries ◽  
Tobias Bernaisch
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Random Effects ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Double Object ◽  
Indian English ◽  
British English ◽  
Double Object Construction ◽  
Deviation Analysis ◽  
Dative Alternation ◽  
Object Construction

The present paper studies the dative alternation with GIVE, i.e. the alternation between the double-object construction (e.g. John gave Mary a book) and the prepositional dative (e.g. John gave a book to Mary), in relation to the norms underlying this constructional choice in six South Asian Englishes. Via Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis with Regression (MuPDAR) including random effects, we identify (i) factors triggering different constructional choices in South Asian Englishes in comparison to British English and (ii) the linguistic epicentre of English in South Asia with regard to the dative alternation. We are able to show that discourse accessibility of patient and recipient as well as pronominality of recipient are actuators of structural nativisation in South Asian Englishes and — in agreement with a more general sociolinguistic approach — find via a bottom-up approach that Indian English may be regarded as the linguistic epicentre of English for South Asia.

Complementation of ditransitive verbs in South Asian Englishes: a multifactorial analysis

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Schilk ◽  
Joybrato Mukherjee ◽  
Christopher Nam ◽  
Sach Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Multinomial Logistic Regression ◽  
Driving Factors ◽  
Large Area ◽  
Indian English ◽  
British English ◽  
Multifactorial Analysis ◽  
Dative Alternation ◽  
Ditransitive Verbs ◽  
Selection Of

AbstractThis paper examines parallels and differences between South Asian Englishes and British English with regard to various factors driving the selection of verb-complementation patterns. Focusing on the prototypical ditransitive verb give and its complementation, we use large web-derived corpora and distinguish between two possible response cases, one based on the dative and prepositional construction (i.e. the dative alternation), the other including monotransitive complementation. Our data has been additionally coded for a number of potential driving factors, such as pronominality and discourse accessibility of the participants in the constructions. Applying a model-exploration technique we isolate the main driving factors for the varieties under scrutiny (Indian English, Pakistani English and British English) and analyze their influence on pattern selection based on a multinomial logistic regression formulation. Our findings show that, while there is a large area of overlap between the varieties, Pakistani English is closer to British English with regard to relevant driving factors than Indian English. Furthermore, we reveal interesting parallels between all three varieties in the use of monotransitive complementation.

scholarly journals Locating variation in the dative alternation

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Biggs
Keyword(s):  
Double Object ◽  
British English ◽  
Double Object Construction ◽  
Dative Alternation ◽  
Object Construction ◽  
Main Variety ◽  
Syntactic Properties

This paper investigates the structure of the dative alternation in dialects of Northwest British English. This includes theme passivization of apparent Double Object Constructions (It was given her). Detailed investigation shows that different dialects use distinct licensing strategies to derive the Theme passive structure. The main variety discussed is Liverpool English, where Theme passivisation is shown to derive from a prepositional dative with a null preposition. In contrast, Manchester English, a neighbouring variety, derives Theme passives of the Double Object Construction, via an Applicative configuration (Haddican 2010, Haddican and Holmberg 2012). The study shows that a range of syntactic properties and restrictions on a structure can be traced back to variation in the functional lexicon.

A multivariate analysis of the Old English ACC+DAT double object alternation

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludovic De Cuypere
Keyword(s):  
Logistic Regression ◽  
Multivariate Analysis ◽  
Regression Analysis ◽  
Old English ◽  
Mixed Effects ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Double Object ◽  
British English ◽  
Indirect Object ◽  
Dative Alternation

AbstractIn Old English, the ditransitive construction with an accusative (direct) object and a dative (indirect) object occurred with two alternating object orders: ACC-DAT vs. DAT-ACC. This study examines the motivations behind the OE speakers’ choice for one of both orders. The effect of 16 factors was evaluated based on a corpus sample of N = 2409 sentences drawn from the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al. 2003). The data was analysed by means of a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis. The results indicate that the ACC+DAT alternation was largely driven by the same factors that motivate the dative alternation in later stages of British English. However, no evidence was found for specific verb preferences in Old English, which suggests that the OE object alternation was less driven by semantics than the dative alternation in PDE. It is argued that the results further substantiate Wolk et al.’s (2012) claim that the cognitive mechanisms underlying present-day probabilistic patterns also underlie past variation.

Non-Canonical Syntax in South Asian Varieties of English: A Corpus-Based Pilot Study on Fronting

2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Götz
Keyword(s):  
Pilot Study ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Indian English ◽  
British English

AbstractIn the present paper, I present a pilot study on fronting in six South Asian Varieties of English, i.e. Indian English (IndE), Bangladeshi English (BgE), Sri Lankan English (SLE), Nepali English (NpE) and Pakistani English (PkE) as compared to their historical input variety, i.e. British English (BrE). For each of these varieties, based on the

“This hair-style called as ‘duck tail’”

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Koch ◽  
Claudia Lange ◽  
Sven Leuckert
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
The South ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Transitive Verb ◽  
Data Points ◽  
Hair Style ◽  
Motivating Factor

This paper focuses on the ‘intrusive as’-construction in complex-transitive verb complementation which was so far only attested for Indian English. Our data show that ‘intrusive as’ is a common feature in South Asian Englishes generally, albeit to different degrees. Comparing the South Asian data with data from Learner Englishes allows to test several hypotheses concerning the origin of ‘intrusive as’; the most robust correlation within the data points to redundancy as a motivating factor for both ESL and EFL contexts.

scholarly journals ‘Give it him and then I’ll give you money for it’. The dative alternation in Contemporary British English

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-28
Author(s):  
Juan Lorente Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Double Object ◽  
British English ◽  
Double Object Construction ◽  
Dative Alternation ◽  
Object Construction ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Ditransitive Verbs ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Prepositional Object ◽  
Linguistic Phenomenon

‘Dative alternation’ refers to a linguistic phenomenon related to ditransitive verbs, that is, verbs which take a subject and two objects referring to a theme and a recipient. In English, the phenomenon offers the possibility of alternation between a prepositional object construction (PREP), where the recipient is encoded as a prepositional phrase (give it to him), a double object construction (DOC), where the recipient precedes the theme (give him it) and an alternative double object construction (altDOC), where the theme takes precedence over the recipient (give it him), the latter constrained to dialectal usage. Even though this alternation has been extensively addressed in the literature, few studies have considered language-external factors in determining the choice of encoding. This paper analyses the distribution of ditransitive forms in competition in contemporary British English from a twofold perspective, shedding some light on the distribution of these variants across time, along with the study of PREP, DOC and altDOC in relation to their sociolinguistic dimension. The corpus used as source of evidence is the British National Corpus, a 100-million-word collection of both written and spoken language from a wide range of sources.

Mandative subjunctive versus should in world Englishes: a new take on an old alternation

Corpora ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-241
Author(s):  
Sandra C. Deshors ◽  
Stefan Th. Gries
Keyword(s):  
World Englishes ◽  
Conditional Inference ◽  
Global English ◽  
Web Based ◽  
British English ◽  
New Strategy ◽  
Conditional Inference Trees

This study explores the alternation between the mandative subjunctive and its modal alternative with should across native and non-native Englishes. Methodologically, we try to improve on existing standards by investigating over 3,300 occurrences of the alternation from the Corpus of Web-based Global English and annotated for a range of linguistic factors analysed with a forest of conditional inference trees; also, we are exemplifying a new strategy for the use of random or conditional inference forests in corpus-based alternation studies. We obtain a forest with significant prediction accuracies and a good C-score and discuss the strongest predictors of the subjunctive versus should alternation across Englishes. Contrasting with existing research, our multi-factorial results: ( i) suggest that in British English the mandative subjunctive may not be dying out as much as we thought; and ( ii) individual suasive verbs influence speakers' use of the two variants more than their variety of English.

The hypothetical subjunctive in South Asian Englishes

2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Hundt ◽  
Sebastian Hoffmann ◽  
Joybrato Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Indian English ◽  
British English ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Usage Patterns ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Newspaper Data ◽  
Local Use ◽  
Qualitative Analyses

This paper studies the distribution and usage patterns in hypothetical if-clauses in a set of South Asian Englishes (SAEs), namely Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan English on the basis of web-derived newspaper data. Comparative evidence comes from newspaper texts in the British National Corpus (BNC). It looks at the use of subjunctive were, indicative was and modal would as variant verb forms in the if-clause. The qualitative analyses also consider tense sequencing in the main and subordinate clause. In terms of overall frequencies, the SAEs do not cluster together in their use of the subjunctive but form a gradient or cline with British English at one end. Similarities between the SAEs emerge from the qualitative analyses. An additional, serendipitous result of the study concerns the local use in SAEs of the subordinator on if meaning ‘whether’, a pattern that is likely to have its origin in Indian English.

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