Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2017 / Modelling morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes from a register perspective

Modelling morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes from a register perspective

Paper · 2017 · Elena Seoane

Summary

The paper tests a claim by Miller (2000) and Brown and Miller (2017). They argue that in spoken English the adverbs just, (n)ever and yet are turning into dedicated markers of perfect meaning, covering recent past, experiential and resultative readings. Under this claim, the have + past participle periphrasis weakens, and the adverbs can even pair with the simple past.

Seoane works within Usage Based Theory and uses a function-to-form (onomasiological) design. She starts from contexts that express perfect meaning and records every form used in them, rather than retrieving only present perfect forms. The data cover ten high-frequency verbs in eight ICE components: one L1 benchmark, six Outer Circle varieties from Asia and Africa, and one Caribbean ESD variety, about eight million words in total. Varieties and registers are compared on how often the adverbs serve as perfect markers and how this interacts with polarity and semantic verb type.

The hypothesis holds only in part. The main finding, which emerged from the data rather than being planned, is that register is the strongest factor shaping this entrenchment. Rigorous models of morphosyntactic variation therefore need a register lens, following Biber and colleagues.

Key points

  • Corpora used: ICE-GB as reference, plus ICE-HK, ICE-SIN, ICE-IND, ICE-PHIL, ICE-NIG, ICE-EA and ICE-JA (Jamaican, treated as ESD). ICE-Sri Lanka was left out because only its written part exists.
  • ICE corpora hold roughly 1M words per variety, split 40% written and 60% spoken. Some register cells are tiny; press editorials, for example, amount to 10 texts of about 20,000 words.
  • GloWbE (1.9 billion words of web text) was judged unsuitable for register comparison, because its "general" section also contains blogs.
  • Earlier work by the same research group found these adverbial perfect markers frequent in British English but much rarer in Asian varieties.
  • Brown and Miller's example of an adverb-dependent perfect: "?She has blinked" is odd, while "She has just blinked" is fine.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Function-to-form retrieval: collect every context that carries a given meaning, then list all forms that realise it, instead of starting from a single form. This exposes competitors such as just + preterite that a form-based search would miss.
  • I2. Some constructions are acceptable only with an adverb, so the adverb carries part of the grammatical meaning rather than being an optional modifier.
  • I3. Register turned out to be the variable that explained most of the variation, which only became visible once the data were split by fine register categories.
  • I4. Comparability takes priority over coverage: incomplete components were dropped, and a corpus whose sections overlap was rejected for register contrasts.
  • I5. Spoken-versus-written contrasts have been used as a rough proxy for ongoing change, though the author flags this practice as needing critical scrutiny.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Recent-past or experiential readings in frames should be triggered by just/ever/yet even when the verb is simple past, not only by have + VBN.
  • I2 (tree): Treat just/never/yet attached to the verb as aspect-bearing advmod and preserve this link through UD dialect conversion, so later stages can read perfect semantics from it.
  • I3 (learn): Break down parser and reader evaluation by register (spoken, letters, editorials, fiction) so that an average score does not hide register-specific failures.
  • I4 (learn): When building silver data or test splits, exclude sources whose genre labels are unreliable or overlapping, rather than mixing them into register-stratified metrics.
  • I5 (world): Temporal interpretation could store a register-aware prior on whether a simple past with just denotes current relevance, rather than assuming one tense-to-meaning mapping.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universidade de VigoVigo · Spain3 works · 4 citations

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Elena Seoane. 2017. Modelling morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes from a register perspective. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 55.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20176817

@article{seoane2017modelling,
  title = {{Modelling morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes from a register perspective}},
  author = {Elena Seoane},
  journal = {Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 55},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.26754/ojs\_misc/mj.20176817},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20176817}
}

References

58 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. A dger , David and Graeme T rousdale . 2007. “Variation in English syntax: Theoretical implications”. English Language and Linguistics 11 (2): 261-278. find
  2. B iber , Douglas. 2012. “Register as a predictor of linguistic variation”. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 8 (1): 9-37. find
  3. B iber , Douglas, Jesse E gbert , Bethany G ray , Rahel O ppliger and Benedikt S zmrecsanyi . 2016. “Variation versus text-linguistic approaches to grammatical change in English: Nominal modifiers of head nouns”. In Kyto, M. and P. Pahta (eds.) Handbook of English Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.: 351-375. find
  4. B iber , Douglas and Bethany G ray . 2013. “Being specific about historical change: The Influence of sub-register”. Journal of English Linguistics 41: 104-134. find
  5. B iber , Douglas and Bethany G ray . 2016. Grammatical Complexity in Academic English. Linguistic Change in Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. find
  6. B iber , Douglas, Stig J ohansson , Geoffrey L eech , Susan C onrad and Edward F inegan . 1999. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman. find
  7. B iewer , Carolin. 2008. “South Pacific Englishes – Unity and diversity in the usage of the present perfect”. In Nevalainen, T., I. Taavitsainen, P. Pahta and M. Korhonen (eds.). Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 203-219. find
  8. B rown , Keith and Jim M iller . 2017. A Critical Account of English Syntax. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P. find
  9. B ybee , Joan. 2006. “From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition”. Language 82(4): 711-733. find
  10. B ybee , Joan. 2011. “Usage-based theory and grammaticalization”. In Narrog, H. and B. Heine (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford U.P.: 69-78. find
  11. B ybee , Joan. 2013. “Usage-based theory and exemplar representations of constructions”. In Hoffman, T. and G. Trousdale (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford U.P.: 49-69. find
  12. B ybee , Joan and Paul J. H opper . 2001. “Introduction to frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure”. In Bybee, J. and P. J. Hopper (eds.) Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistics Structure. Amsterdam: Benjamins: 1-26. find
  13. C ollins , Peter. 2009. “Modals and quasi-modals in World Englishes”. World Englishes 28(3): 281-292. find
  14. C omrie , Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. find
  15. D ahl , Östen. 1999. “Perfect”. In Brown, K. and J. Miller (eds.) Concise Encyclopaedia of Grammatical Categories. Oxford: Elsevier: 30-37. find
  16. D ahl , Östen and Eva H edin . 2000. “Current relevance and event reference”. In Ö. Dahl. (ed.) Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter: 385-401. find
  17. D avies , Mark. 2013. “Corpus of global web-based English (GloWbE)”. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe. ↗
  18. D avydova , Julia. 2011. The Present Perfect in Non-Native Englishes. A Corpus-Based Study of Variation. Berlin and Boston: Mouton de Gruyter. find
  19. E lsness , Johan. 2009. “The present perfect and the preterite”. In Rohdenburg, G. and J. Schlüter. (eds.) One Language, Two Grammars? Differences between British and American English. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.: 228-245. find
  20. E ngel , Dulcie and Marie-Eve R itz . 2000. “The use of the present perfect in Australian English”. Australian Journal of Linguistics 20(2): 119-140. find
  21. F ischer , Olga. 2007. Morphosyntactic Change. Functional and Formal Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford U.P. find
  22. F ox , Barbara. 2007. “Principles shaping grammatical practices”. Discourse Studies 9: 299-318. find
  23. G eeslin , Kimberly with Avizia Y. L ong . 2014. Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition. NY/London: Routledge. find
  24. G reenbaum , Sidney. (ed.) 1996. Comparing English Worldwide: The International Corpus of English. Oxford: Clarendon Press. find
  25. H ilpert , Martin and Christian M air . 2015. “Grammatical change”. In Biber, D. and R. Reppen (eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.: 180-200. find
  26. H uddleston , Rodney and Geoffrey K. P ullum . 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.
  27. H undt , Marianne. 2015. “World Englishes”. In Biber, D and R. Reppen (eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.: 381-400. find
  28. H undt , Marianne and Nicholas S mith . 2009. “The present perfect in British and American English: Has there been a change, recently?”. ICAME Journal 33: 45-63. find
  29. K achru , B. (ed.) 1982. The Other Tongue — English across Cultures. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press. find
  30. L angacker , Ronald W. 2000. “A Dynamic usage-based model”. In Barlow M. and S. Kemmer (eds.) Usage Based Models of Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 127-163. find
  31. L oureiro -P orto , Lucia (forthcoming). “ICE vs GloWbE: Big data and corpus compilation”. World Englishes. doi: 10.1111/weng.12281 M air , Christian. 2015. “Cross-variety diachronic drifts and ephemeral regional contrasts. An analysis of modality in the extended Brown family of corpora and what it can tell us about the New Englishes”. In Collins, P. (ed.) Grammatical Change in English World-Wide. Amsterdam: Benjamins: 119-146. ↗
  32. M iller , Jim. 2000. “The perfect in spoken and written English”. Transactions of the Philological Society 98(2): 323-352. find
  33. M ukherjee , Joybrato and Marco S chilk . 2012. “Exploring variation and change in New Englishes: Looking into the International Corpus of English (ICE) and beyond”. In Nevalainen, T. and E. Traugott (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Oxford U.P.: 189-199. find
  34. N eumann , Stella. 2013. Contrastive Register Variation: A Quantitative Approach to the Comparison of English and German. Berlin: Mounton de Gruyter. find
  35. S chaub , Steffen. 2016. “The influence of register on noun phrase complexity in varieties of English”. In Schubert, C. and C. Sanchez-Stock-hammer (eds) Variational Text Linguistics: Revisiting Register in English. Berlin: Mounton de Gruyter: 251-270. find
  36. S chneider , Edgar W. 2003. “The dynamics of New Englishes: From identity construction to dialect birth”. Language 79(2): 233-281. find
  37. S chneider , Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties Around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. find
  38. S chneider , Edgar W. 2013. “English as a contact language: The ‘New Englishes’”. In Schreier, D. and M. Hundt (eds.) English as a Contact Language. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.: 131-148. find
  39. S eoane , Elena and Cristina S uárez -G ómez . 2013. “The expression of the perfect in East and South-East Asian Englishes”. English World-Wide 34(1): 1-25. find
  40. S eoane , Elena. (Forthcoming). “The role of co-text and context in the entrenchment of new grammatical markers in World Englishes”. In Busse, B and R. Möhling-Falke (eds.) Patterns in Language and Linguistics: Crossing the Boundaries in Interdisciplinary Discourse. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. S eoane , Elena. 2016a. “The perfect space in creole-related varieties of English: The case of Jamaican English”. In Werner, W., E. Seoane and C. Suárez-Gómez (eds.) Reassessing the Present Perfect. Corpus Studies and Beyond. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter: 195-221. find
  41. S eoane , Elena. 2016b. “World Englishes today”. In Seoane, E. and C. Suárez-Gómez. (eds.) World Englishes: New Theoretical and Methodological Considerations. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins: 1-15. find
  42. S uárez -G ómez , Cristina and Elena S eoane . 2013. “‘They have published a new cultural policy that just come out’: Competing forms in spoken and written New Englishes”. In Bech, K. and G. Andersen (eds.) English Corpus Linguistics: Variation in Time, Space and Genre. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi: 163-182. find
  43. S uárez -G ómez , Cristina. (2017). “A function-to-form approach to perfect meaning in Africa, Asian, and Caribbean Englishes”. Manuscript submitted for publication. find
  44. S zmrecsanyi , Benedikt and Lars H inrichs . 2008. “Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: A multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres”. In Nevalainen, T., I. Taavitsainen, P. Pahta and M. Korhonen (eds.). Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 291-309. find
  45. S zmrecsanyi , Benedikt and Bernd K ortmann . 2011. “Typological profiling: Learner Englishes versus indigenized L2 varieties of English”. In Mukherjee, J and M. Hundt (eds.) Exploring Second-language Varieties of English and Learner Englishes: Bridging a Paradigm Gap. Amsterdam: Benjamins: 167–187. find
  46. T homason , Sarah G. 2001. Language Contact. An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P. find
  47. T rousdale , Graeme. 2010. An Introduction to English Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburg U.P. find
  48. V an der A uwera , Johan, Dirk N oël and Astrid de W it . 2012. “The diverging Need (to)’s of Asian Englishes”. In Hundt, M. and U. Gut (eds.) Mapping Unity and Diversity Worldwide: Corpus-Based Studies of New Englishes. Amsterdam: Benjamins: 55-75. find
  49. V an R ooy , Bertus. 2009. “The shared core of the perfect across Englishes: A corpus-based analysis”. In Hoffman, T and L. Siebers (eds.) World Englishes: Problems - Properties – Prospects. Amsterdam: Benjamins: 309-330. find
  50. W erner , Valentin, Elena S eoane and Cristina S uárez -G ómez . 2016. Re-assessing the Present Perfect. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. find
  51. W erner , Valentin. 2013. “Temporal adverbials and the present perfect/past tense alternation”. English World-Wide 34(2): 202-240. find
  52. W erner , Valentin. 2014. The Present Perfect in World Englishes: Charting Unity and Diversity. Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press. find
  53. W erner , Valentin. 2016. “Rise of the undead? BE-perfects in World Englishes”. In Valentin Werner, Elena Seoane & Cristina Suárez-Gómez (eds.) Re-assessing the Present Perfect. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 259-294. find
  54. W erner , Valentin and Robert F uchs . 2017. “The Present perfect in Nigerian English”. Language and Linguistics 21(1): 129-153. find
  55. X iao , Richard. 2009. “Multidimensional analysis and the study of World Englishes”. World Englishes 28(4): 721-450. find
  56. Y ao , Xinyue and Peter C ollins . 2012. “The present perfect in World Englishes”. World Englishes 31(3): 386–403. find
  57. Y erastov , Yuri. 2015. “A Construction grammar analysis of the transitive Be-perfect in present-day Canadian English”. English Language and Linguistics 19(1): 157-178. find
  58. Received: 22 February 2017 Accepted: 31 March 2017 find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/seoane-2017-modelling-morphosyntactic-variation-world-englishes/