Substrate Language Influence in Postcolonial Asian Englishes and the Role of Transfer in the Complementation System

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study aims to contribute to the body of work on the effects of substrate languages and language transfer in World Englishes by asking whether the clausal verb complementation systems of the verb regret in eight Asian postcolonial varieties are affected by the substrate languages. An examination of the most widely spoken substrates in each variety does not seem to indicate that these have an effect on the respective complementation systems, since varieties with similar substrate languages have different distributions. In view of this, a further two factors are explored. First, the role played by the phase of development in the Dynamic Model (Schneider 2007), which also seems not to explain the different distributions: varieties in the same phase of development exhibit distinct distributions. Second, geographical proximity, which appears to explain similarities and differences between varieties, since South Asian varieties display similar characteristics, whereas these differ from those found in Southeast Asian varieties.