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

  • Sandra Götz EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: September 2, 2017
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Abstract

In 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 South Asian Varieties of English (SAVE) newspaper corpus and the news section of the British National Corpus, 500 sentences per variety were manually parsed and the sentence-initial elements were annotated for their information status. Methodologically, I apply regression and CART classification tree analysis to test for variety-specific as well as universal features of fronting in SAVEs. The analysis reveals that constituents are mainly likely to be fronted when the information they represent is given (regardless of variety). Within this category, there are also clear variety-specific differences between IndE, PkE, SLE and BdE on the one hand (showing a generally higher frequency of object fronting), and BrE, MdE and NpE on the other (with a higher frequency of fronted adjuncts).

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Ronja Jassmann for her invaluable help with the data coding and the editors for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. All remaining flaws are my responsibility alone.

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Published Online: 2017-9-2
Published in Print: 2017-9-26

©2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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