The lexis-grammar interface as breeding ground for innovations: Verb-complementation in second language varieties of English

Laporte, Samantha
(2016) Symposium ‘Mechanisms of clause linking: Theoretical and typological perspectives’ — Location: University of Helsinki, Helsinki (23.August.2016)

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  • Laporte, SamanthaUCLouvain
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In many British or American post-colonial settings, English is still recognized as an official or semi-official language and plays a (more or less) important part in education, administration and the media. Due to the pervasiveness of English in these territories, second language varieties of English have developed. These varieties have undergone nativization, i.e. “systematic changes in […] formal features at all linguistic levels” (Lowenberg,1986: 1), as a result of “new ethnographic and other cultural ecologies” (Mufwene, 1993: 195). In other words, they are marked by a number of innovations. While innovations in such varieties have been described at many linguistic levels (e.g. phonology (Fuchs, 2014), morphology (Biermeier, 2009), tense and aspect (Werner, 2013)), the lexis-grammar interface has been argued to be particularly prone to innovation (Bauer, 2002; Schneider, 2007). Verb-complementation figures prominently in this regard with reported innovations such as new prepositional verbs (e.g.discuss about), or new light verb constructions (e.g. give a look) (e.g. Mukherjee, 2010). Such lexico-grammatical features are of particular interest to the study of nativization because “they operate way below the level of linguistic awareness” (Schneider, 2007: 187) and are therefore likely highly revealing of underlying and unconscious processes of acquisition and hence nativization. Interestingly, it seems that many such innovations were once described as specific to one variety but are in fact shared by several varieties (Nesselhauf, 2009). Such similarities are often referred to as ‘Angloversals’ (Mair, 2003) and suggest that universal cognitive processes (e.g. analogy or simplification) may be at play in innovative features. Against this backdrop, this contribution examines the complementation of the high-frequency verb make in British English and three second language varieties of English, namely Hong Kong, Indian and Singapore English on the basis of corpus data (The International Corpus of English (Greenbaum & Nelson, 1996)). This study is rooted within a Construction Grammar framework (Goldberg, 1995; 2006), which is particularly well-suited for this analysis as it captures the lexis-grammar interface by positing a continuum in degree of abstraction of constructions that ranges from schematic, i.e. abstract, constructions (e.g. the ditransitive construction [Xsubj V Yobj1 Zobj2]) to (partially) substantive, i.e. lexical, constructions (e.g. [Xsubj jog <someone’s> memory]) (Goldberg, 2006). Taking advantage of this continuum of abstraction, a three-pronged approach is taken to the patterning of make: (1) at the highest level of abstraction, the distribution of make across schematic constructions is compared across varieties; (2) at an intermediate level, the different lexically-bound patterns of these schematic constructions are identified and compared across varieties (e.g. [Xsubj make Yobj Vinf], [Xsubj make Yobj Vto-inf] for the causative construction); (3) at a more substantive level, the collocates of make in certain slots of the most frequent constructions (e.g. the verb-slot in the causative construction) are contrasted across varieties. Descriptively, the different innovative patterns are thus identified and compared at each level, and in a second step, an attempt is made at explaining these innovative features, thereby hopefully shedding some further light on processes of nativization in L2 settings. References Bauer, L. (2002). An Introduction to International Varieties of English. Edinburgh: EUP. Biermeier, T. (2009). Word-formation in New Englishes. Properties and trends. In Hoffmann, T. & L. Siebers (eds.), World Englishes – Problems, Properties and Prospects. Selected Papers from the 13th IAWE Conference. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 331-349. Fuchs, R. (2014). Integrating variability in loudness and duration in a multidimensional model of speech rhythm: Evidence from Indian English and British English. In Campbell N., D. Gibbon, & D. Hirst (eds.), Social and Linguistic Speech Prosody. Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Speech Prosody. Dublin, 290-294. Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago IL: The University Press of Chicago. Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalizations in English. Oxford: OUP. Greenbaum, S. & G. Nelson. (1996). The International Corpus of English (ICE) Project. World Englishes 15(1), 3-15. Lowenberg, P. H. (1986). Non-native varieties of English: nativization, norms, and implications. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 8(1), 1-18. Mair, C. (2003). Kreolismen und verbales Identitätsmanagement im geschriebenen jamaikanischen Englisch. In E. Vogel, A. Napp, and W. Lutterer (eds.) Zwischen Ausgrenzung und Hybridisierung, Würzburg: Ergon, 79-96. Mufwene, S. S. (1993). African substratum: Possibility and evidence: A discussion of Alleyne’s and Hancock’s papers. In Mufwene S. S. (ed.), Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 192-208. Mukherjee, J. (2010). Corpus-based insights into verb complementational innovations in Indian English. In Lenz A. N. & A. Plewnia (eds.), Grammar between norm and variation. Frankfurt a.m.: Peter Lang, 219-241. Nesselhauf, N. (2009). Co-selection phenomena across new englishes: parallels (and differences) to foreign learner varieties. English World-Wide 30(1), 1-26. Schneider, E. W. (2007). Postcolonial English: Varieties around the world. Cambridge, UK: CUP. Werner, V. (2013). Temporal adverbials and the present perfect/past tense alternation. English World-Wide 34(2), 202-240.
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Laporte, S. (2016). The lexis-grammar interface as breeding ground for innovations: Verb-complementation in second language varieties of English. Symposium ‘Mechanisms of clause linking: Theoretical and typological perspectives’, University of Helsinki, Helsinki. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/92809