Relative Clauses in Hong Kong English: A Corpus-based Perspective

2011 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wang Yan
2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-371 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolas Gisborne

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-305
Author(s):  
Elena Seoane ◽  
Cristina Suárez-Gómez

Abstract In this study we examine elaboration, compression and explicitness in academic and popular writing in an Outer Circle variety of English, that of Hong-Kong, as represented in the International Corpus of English corpus. As Biber and Gray (2016) show, contemporary academic discourse is structurally compressed at NP level (rather than elaborated) and inexplicit in the expression of meaning. The linguistic features selected for analysis are short passives, which are compressed and inexplicit, and adnominal relative clauses, which represent the opposite tendency, that towards elaboration and explicitness. We focus on register variation through analyzing, first, differences between academic and popular writing, and second, interdisciplinary variation in four sub-registers: humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and technology.


2000 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kingsley Bolton
Keyword(s):  

English Today ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawnea Sum Pok Ting ◽  
Janice Wing Sze Wong

Although a large number of varieties of English in Asia have gained recognition as independent varieties, this has not been the case for Hong Kong English (HKE) (Jenkins, 2015: 162). The city has a low level of affiliation towards HKE (Jenkins, 2015: 167) and often laments its ever-falling standard of English (Leung, 2015). There exists a phenomenon of ‘linguistic schizophrenia’ – the community may recognise that a local variety of English exists and conform to its features in practice, but it still looks to native varieties as the norm and views local features as evidence of deteriorating language standards (Kachru, 1983: 118).


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 724
Author(s):  
Yunyun Ran ◽  
Jeroen Van De Weijer ◽  
Marjoleine Sloos

Hong Kong English is to a certain extent a standardized English variety spoken in a bilingual (English-Cantonese) context. In this article we compare this (native) variety with English as a foreign language spoken by other Cantonese speakers, viz. learners of English in Guangzhou (mainland China). We examine whether the notion of standardization is relevant for intonation in this case and thus whether Hong Kong English is different from Cantonese English in a wider perspective, or whether it is justified to treat Hong Kong English and Cantonese English as the same variety (as far as intonation is concerned). We present a comparison between intonational contours of different sentence types in the two varieties, and show that they are very similar. This shows that, in this respect, a learned foreign-language variety can resemble a native variety to a great extent.


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