Syntactic complexity and language contactA corpus-based study of relative clauses in British English and Indian English

  1. Iván Tamaredo 1
  1. 1 Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, España
Revista:
Alicante Journal of English Studies / Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses: RAEI
  1. Sánchez Fajardo, José Antonio (coord.)
  2. Palacios Martínez, Ignacio M. (coord.)

ISSN: 0214-4808 2171-861X

Ano de publicación: 2017

Título do exemplar: English as a Contact Language: Variation and Diffusion

Número: 30

Páxinas: 149-182

Tipo: Artigo

DOI: 10.14198/RAEI.2017.30.06 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openRUA editor

Outras publicacións en: Alicante Journal of English Studies / Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses: RAEI

Resumo

The aim of the present paper is to test the claim that contact simplifies language (cf. Kusters, 2008) by comparing the domain of relative clause formation in British English, a L1 variety, and Indian English, a L2 variety. According to Hawkins (1999), the processing cost of relativizing a noun phrase increases down the Accessibility Hierarchy (Subject > Direct Object> Indirect Object > Oblique > Genitive> Object of Comparison) proposed by Keenan and Comrie (1977). Subject relative clauses are thus easier to process than direct object relatives, and so on. The results of a corpus study of the British and Indian components of the International Corpus of English show that the Accessibility Hierarchy has an indirect effect on the production of relative clauses in British English and Indian English: whereas the distribution of relative clauses with respect to the hierarchy is very similar in both varieties, the number of complex relatives, i.e., with coordination or further embedding, decreases in the lower positions in Indian English. These results thus suggest that language contact plays a significant role in relative clause use and accounts for certain differences between L1 and L2 varieties of English in this grammatical domain.

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