Collocations in Indian English: A Corpus-Based Sample Analysis

Abstract:

The corpus-based description of varieties of English is a discipline that only recently gained ground in variety research because there has been only a limited amount of data collected in corpora so far. Many descriptions of specific varieties of English, such as Indian English, in the past have therefore been mainly based on intuition or introspection. The present paper is an attempt at a pilot study that merges the benefits of such past work with the advantages corpus-based methodology has to offer. The two parts deal with the classification of Indian English within the dynamic model for the description of New Englishes proposed by Schneider (2003) and comparison of a sample-set of observances made in Nihalani et al. 2004 with information that can be obtained by employing two corpora of Indian English (ICE-India and the Kolhapur-Corpus) and two British English reference corpora (ICE-GB and LOB).