Abstract
AbstractThis study compares the complexity of the noun phrase (NP) in Ghanaian English in a real‐time perspective. Based on the Historical Corpus English in Ghana (1966–1975) and the Ghanaian component of the International Corpus of English (mainly 2000s), representing the early and late stages of structural nativisation in the dynamic model, NP complexity is measured using five criteria (NP pattern, complexity of the premodifier, length of the pre‐ and postmodifier and complexity of the postmodifier). The study uses conditional inference trees, taking into account three potential factors: corpus, text type and syntactic function. The results show that over time the complexity of the NP in Ghanaian English has increased, which is interpreted as Ghanaians becoming more proficient and therefore employing more sophisticated structures. Text type is an important predictor; syntactic function plays only a minor role. By adding a diachronic perspective, the study contributes to current models of the evolution of world Englishes.
Highlights
Several aspects of the noun phrase (NP) have been studied in the context of world Englishes research, such as relative clause formation in Thai (Pingkarawat, 2009) and Ghanaian English (Huber, 2012), the dative alternation in South Asian Englishes (Bernaisch, Gries, & Mukherjee, 2014), genitive alternation in Nigerian English (Akinlotan, 2016) or plural marking in Tswana English (Mohr, 2017)
The current study aims to complement this previous work on NP complexity in world Englishes by adding a realtime perspective
The aim of the present study was to add to our understanding of NP complexity in world Englishes by using real-time data
Summary
Several aspects of the noun phrase (NP) have been studied in the context of world Englishes research, such as relative clause formation in Thai (Pingkarawat, 2009) and Ghanaian English (Huber, 2012), the dative alternation in South Asian Englishes (Bernaisch, Gries, & Mukherjee, 2014), genitive alternation in Nigerian English (Akinlotan, 2016) or plural marking in Tswana English (Mohr, 2017). Brunner (2014, 2017) compares written and spoken data from the British, Singaporean and Kenyan components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) with respect to language contact phenomena and simplification. He shows that there are several effects of the NP structure in the substrate languages Ghana moved into the nativisation phase, which is characterised by large-scale linguistic change as more and more of the indigenous population acquire and learn English and transform the language on all linguistic levels, most notably in a distinct accent and a localised vocabulary (Brato, 2019b), and in preferences for certain morphosyntactic structures (Brato, 2018)
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