Light verb constructions in second-language varieties of English: a corpus-based investigation of nativization in Hong Kong English

Laporte, Samantha
(2017) Light Verb Constructions in Germanic Languages — Location: Université Saint-Louis, Bruxelles (17.November.2017)

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  • Laporte, SamanthaUCLouvain
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Given their frequency, productivity, syntactic versatility, and collocational restrictions, light verb constructions (LVCs) in English represent an interesting object of study from a variationist perspective. While numerous studies have focused on L1 varieties of English (e.g. British, American, or New Zealand English, cf. Algeo, 1995; Smith, 2009), it is only relatively recently that LVCs have started to draw interest in institutionalized second-language (L2) varieties of English, i.e. varieties that have retained an official status in former British or American colonies (e.g. India, Hong Kong, Singapore) and which develop new linguistic conventions via the process of nativization. Conventionalized ‘new light verb constructions’ (e.g. give a look, take a glimpse) have for example been identified in Indian English (Hoffmann et al., 2011), as well as different preferences in the choice of the light verb combining with particular nouns in Sri Lankan English (Bernaisch, 2015). Such lexico-grammatical phenomena hold much interest for the study of nativization because they “operate way below the level of linguistic awareness” (Schneider, 2007: 187) and are therefore likely to be revealing of underlying processes of nativization (e.g. semantico-structural analogy, cf. Mukherjee, 2010). This paper aims to contribute to this strand of research by investigating the make-LVC in Hong Kong English (HKE), with British English (BrE) as benchmark variety. To this purpose, a total of 1552 instances of the make-LVC have been manually extracted from the British and Hong Kong components of the International Corpus of English (Greenbaum, 1996), which counts circa one million words per variety and represents a range of spoken and written genres. Rooted in a Construction Grammar framework, the analysis seeks to draw up the syntactic, lexical and semantic profile of the make-LVC in HKE. Syntactically, the data are analyzed in terms of determiner use, voice, and nominal modification and complementation. Lexically, the noun-slot of the construction is examined (1) by conducting a collostructional analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries, 2003) to identify the collocational preferences of each variety and possibly uncover new light verb constructions, and (2) by inspecting low-frequency nouns to probe the construction’s productivity. Finally, semantically, the nouns instantiating the noun-slot are categorized into semantic classes to trace potential variety-specific semantics of the construction. Results point to both parallels and differences at all three levels of analysis. Strikingly, non-standard patterns in HKE do not yield frequencies that suggest stable entrenched idiosyncrasies, but rather a higher degree of syntactic and lexical variability. For example, contrary to what has been found for Indian English, while HKE exhibits a number of non-standard verb-noun combinations (e.g. make a boost, make much explanation, make actions), none are frequent enough to qualify as conventionalized ‘new light verb constructions’. These results tie in with the fact that HKE is a variety that is in the relatively early stages of linguistic nativization (Schneider, 2007), and indicate that HKE exhibits patterns of variation that are signs of a variety still in the making. References Algeo, J. (1995). Having a look at the expanded predicate. In Aarts B. & C. F. Meyer (eds.) The Verb in Contemporary English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 203-217. Bernaisch, T. (2015). The Lexis and Lexicogrammar of Sri Lankan English. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Greenbaum, S. (1996). Comparing English Worldwide: The International Corpus of English. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hoffmann, S., Hundt, M., & Mukherjee, J. (2011). Indian English - an emerging epicentre? A pilot study on light verbs in web-derived corpora of South Asian Englishes. Anglia, 129(3-4), 258–280. Mukherjee, Joybrato. (2010). Corpus-based Insights into Verb-complementational Innovations in Indian English Cases of Nativised Semantico-structural Analogy. In A. N. Lenz & P. Albrecht (Eds.), Grammar Between Norm and Variation. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 219-241. Schneider, E. W. (2007). Postcolonial English: varieties around the world. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. (2009). Light verbs in Australian, New Zealand and British English. In P. Peters, P. Collins, & A. Smith (Eds.), Varieties of English Around the World. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 139–154. Stefanowitsch, A. & Gries, S. Th. (2003). Collostructions: Investigating the interaction between words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2), 209–243.
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Laporte, S. (2017). Light verb constructions in second-language varieties of English: a corpus-based investigation of nativization in Hong Kong English. Light Verb Constructions in Germanic Languages, Université Saint-Louis, Bruxelles. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/91287