Global Web-based English Corpus Research Articles

Word formation in Bangladeshi English

Background: This paper aims to investigate the lexical properties of Bangladeshi English (BdE). Bangladesh does not have an official second language. Nevertheless, English has been present in Bangladeshi society for approximately four hundred years. The polity of Bangladesh is also silent about its position in the three-circle model of World English’s and does not have any proper plan for the English language. Very few studies have been done on the English of Bangladesh from World English’s perspective. Methodology: Data is collected from five different sources; a survey, the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE), the News on the Web (NOW), the Oxford English Dictionary, and one corpus compiled with 92 speeches of the former Prime Minister of Bangladesh. This corpus contains 101,490 words. The freeware corpus analysis toolkit Antconc is used to process the data of this corpus. The mixed method is followed in this work. Data is collected quantitatively and analyzed qualitatively. Findings: The result of the study reveals that Bangladeshi English has rich lexical properties. These lexis are formed in different morphological processes. A good fraction of these lexis are noun, but adjective, verb, and adverb are also present. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: These findings can be used as a starting point for further research.

“Eish it’s getting really interesting”: borrowed interjections in South African English

Abstract This article offers a descriptive account of seven interjections, eish, yho, tjo, sho, hayi, hau, and mxm, which are adopted from different local South African languages into South African English. It investigates the frequencies, orthography, syntactic position, collocational forms and discourse-pragmatic roles of these seven interjections, through the lens of pragmatic borrowing and postcolonial corpus pragmatics. The data were retrieved from the South African segment of the Global Web-based English corpus and underwent quantitative and qualitative analysis. The findings indicate that the interjections are all emotive interjections, which mostly express negative emotions, except hayi, which is a phatic interjection that is largely used to show disapproval of some information. All the interjections favour clause-initial position except mxm, which is a loan interjection that represents the kiss-teeth or suck-teeth oral gesture that is common in some parts of Africa and the Caribbean. The article affirms that these loaned interjections accentuate the distinction of South African English from other varieties of English.

Discourse-Pragmatic Borrowing in South African English

This paper explores five borrowed discourse-pragmatic features—wena, mna/mina, yazi, phela, and ke—which are transferred from indigenous South African languages into South African English, with the objective of investigating their frequency, position, collocational patterns, and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are taken from the South African component of the Global Web-based English corpus, are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, from a postcolonial corpus pragmatic framework. The results show that the discourse-pragmatic features are generally infrequent, orthographically stable, and prefer the clause-initial position. The paper indicates that wena is used as an address term to call for the addressee’s attention, mna/mina is used to emphasise personal identity, while yazi seeks confirmation of and signals shared knowledge. Phela is an emphasis marker, while ke indicates contrast, textual coherence, and emphasis. This study underscores the contributions of indigenous South African languages to the discourse-pragmatic features of South African English.

A dialectological approach to complement variability in global web-based English

Computer-Mediated Communication is part of the everyday lives of a great many people of all ages, cultures, social statuses, and geographical locations. In the present study, I explore non-categorical syntactic variability in internet language with data from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE), which includes material from blogs, forums, comments, and other types of websites. The focus is on how the geographical area of internet users affects the use of the clausal complementation patterns available for the verb regret. The analysis of more than 10,000 examples from Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Singaporean, Malaysian, Philippine, Hong Kong, British, and American Englishes shows that geographical origin does have a bearing on the complementation system of this verb, in terms of both the factors that determine variability and the preferences for particular patterns. The varieties displaying more similarities are those that are geographically close, making the distinction between three geographical areas possible: South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), South-East Asia (with Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines) and East Asia (Hong Kong).

Conceptualizing health

Abstract The word ‘health’ is highly polysemous, and many attempts have been made to define its meaning in terms of actual use and to create a workable and even universal concept of health (Balog 1978; Boruchovitch & Mednick 2002). However, though the meaning of ‘health’ has been debated extensively, as well as the metaphorical conceptualizations of illness (e.g., Sontag 1978), there has been little treatment of how health is metaphorically conceptualized. This article investigates the meaning of the word ‘health’ in the United States and the United Kingdom, through a search on websites based on an examination of concordances in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). It focuses on the senses emerging from metaphorical cultural conceptualizations. Recent developments in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Kövecses 2005; Yu 2009) and Cultural Linguistics (Palmer 1996; Sharifian 2011) have increased the focus on the interaction between cognition and culture. I present an analysis of the conceptual metaphors, proposition schemas, and image schemas that converge to form a cultural model for health within these speech communities revealing, for example, that one model sees health in terms of a manageable valuable commodity, which may contribute to health behaviors such as self-tracking and observation, as discussed by Lupton (2016).

Eh Across Englishes: A Corpus-Pragmatic Analysis of the Corpus of Global Web-Based English

This paper presents an analysis of the pragmatic marker eh, which is typical of spoken discourse, in written online discourse from nine varieties of English using the Corpus of Global Web-based English. The analysis focuses on sentence-final eh and considers variation in terms of variety, punctuation, text type, and function. This paper also includes a variationist analysis of eh in contrast to huh. Although there are cross-variety differences, eh is used across all nine varieties in similar ways. Eh is mostly combined with a question mark, it is more frequent in blogs than in general websites, and emphatic functions dominate over narrative and interrogative uses. A qualitative analysis of the indexicalities demonstrates that eh mainly signals orality and informality in online writing but also has specific local meanings. The variationist analysis shows that eh is preferred over huh in the Canadian and New Zealand components. This preference is even more pronounced for the British and Philippine components. In contrast, huh dominates in the US component. These results show that eh is well integrated into online writing and can be characterized as a translocal pragmatic marker as it is used globally but has developed local characteristics.

Linguistic and pragmatic ways of committing oneself

Abstract In this study I focus on the complementation patterns of commissive shell nouns in Ghanaian English (GhE). Commissive shell nouns are a type of illocutionary shell noun, i.e. a noun that encapsulates a content that is usually expressed in a complement or even separate clause or sentence thereby ascribing it an illocutionary force. I use the usage-based approach to the study of language and investigate the behavioral profile of these nouns in GhE. I apply descriptive statistics to data that have been collected from the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). The study provides evidence for the characterization of GhE usage norms, and thus contributes to the scholarly knowledge on this variety of English. It also sheds light on the contribution that the meaning-related and ultimately cognitive perspective can offer in describing the complementation patterns of illocutionary nouns in Postcolonial Englishes (PCEs).

Uncovering Variation in Word Englishes: Finite vs Non-finite Complementation of remember with Prospective Meaning

Remember is a polysemous verb that can govern finite and non-finite complement clauses (CCs). This paper explores the variability between finite and non-finite CCs that follow remember with the prospective meaning ‘remember to do’ (as in Remember to do your homework), looking at three Asian World Englishes – Indian English, Sri Lankan English and Bangladeshi English – and British English, as represented in the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). The prospective use of remember is traditionally classified as allowing to-infinitival CCs as the only complementation option (Cambridge Dictionary Online, “remember”; FrameNet; Oxford Dictionaries Online, “remember”; Huddleston and Pullum et al. 2002, 1242; Mair 2006, 215). However, large databases such as GloWbE reveal the existence of finite CCs with this meaning that depend on remember. The analysis of these CCs in competition, in terms of both distribution and a series of language-internal and external variables, confirms that those which increase complexity (e.g. longer CCs in number of words) favour the choice of finite CCs, in line with the Complexity Principle.

Modals and Quasi-Modals in English World-Wide

This study explores the distribution of modals and quasi-modals in the twenty English dialects represented in the Global Web-based English Corpus (GloWbE). Intervarietal trends are observed across and within the Englishes of the “Inner circle” and “Outer circle.” Ratios calculated for onomasiological pairings of modal expressions suggest that Inner circle varieties tend to be associated more closely than Outer circle varieties—and “epicentral” varieties more so than non-epicentral ones—with trends of frequency change that have been identified in previous diachronic studies of the reference varieties, British and American English. A further type of change is revealed by semantic analysis: Inner circle varieties tend to embrace epistemic modality more readily than Outer circle varieties. Possible explanations considered for intervarietal differences include areal proximity, epicentrality, evolutionary status, and colloquiality.

Multilingual pragmatic markers in South African English

This article provides a descriptive account of five multilingual pragmatic markers – nje, mara, kanti, vele and kaloku – which are borrowed from indigenous South African languages into South African English, with a view to investigating their frequencies, spelling stability, syntactic positioning, distribution across text types, collocational patterns and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are extracted from the South African component of the Global Web-based English corpus, are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, from a postcolonial corpus pragmatic perspective. The results show that the multilingual pragmatic markers are generally infrequent compared to their English counterparts, their spellings are generally stable and their positions in the utterances are based on their functions. The article identifies nje as an attitudinal marker, a focus particle, an emphasis marker, an intensifier and a marker of shared knowledge, mara as a contrastive marker and kanti as a contrastive marker, an inferential marker and an emphasis marker. Vele is an emphasis marker, while kaloku is an attention marker, a topic orientation marker and an inferential marker. In conclusion, these multilingual pragmatic markers contribute to the distinctive nature of South African English at the pragmatic level.

The pragmatics of ‘it is well’ in Nigerian English

Abstract This paper explores the pragmatics of the comment clause, it is well, with a view to examining its origin, frequency, structural features, and extended discourse-pragmatic functions in Nigerian English, from a grammatical-pragmatic approach. The data for the study are collected from the Global Web-based English corpus (Davies, Mark. 2013. Corpus of Global Web-Based English: 1.9 billion words from speakers in 20 countries (GloWbE). Available at: http://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/) and questionnaires, and are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results show that the origin of the clause in Nigerian English is the Bible. The clause occurs most frequently at utterance-final position, and collocates with other discourse-pragmatic features. The results also reveal that the clause performs both textual and interpersonal functions. Textually, it is used as a silence filler and to terminate discourse. Interpersonally, it is employed as a part of a prayer, to express hope, offer comfort, indicate resignation, show (reluctant) acceptance of other people’s actions, and to express sarcasm, amongst other functions. The study shows that the use of it is well is related to the cultural and religious beliefs of Nigerians as well as to the political and economic situation in Nigeria.

Grammatical variation in World Englishes

Abstract This study adopts an onomasiological, alternation-based approach to the exploration of grammatical variation across World Englishes, using data sourced from the 1.9 billion-word Global Web-based English corpus. The macro-orientation of the study, which investigates a set of ten alternations known to be susceptible to diachronic change, facilitates identification of a number of general trends, including the typical advancement of the Inner Circle varieties and of the South-East Asian varieties, the hypercentrality of American English, and the epicentrality of Indian English in South Asia. Possible explanatory factors include colloquialisation, grammatical simplicity/complexity, developmental status, and areal proximity.

Borrowed Swahili discourse-pragmatic features in Kenyan and Tanzanian Englishes

Abstract This study explores five Swahili discourse-pragmatic features – ati/eti, yaani, pole, sasa and sawa – which are borrowed from Swahili into Kenyan and Tanzanian Englishes, with a view to investigating their meanings, frequencies, positioning, collocational patterns, syntactic distribution and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are extracted from the International Corpus of English-East Africa and the Kenyan and Tanzanian components of the corpus of Global Web-based English, are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, from a variational and postcolonial corpus pragmatic framework. The study reveals that the Swahili discourse-pragmatic features occur more frequently in the Kenyan corpora than in the Tanzanian corpora, except in the case of sasa, which occurred with the same frequency in the online corpus. The paper identifies ati/eti as an attention marker, a quotative marker, a hearsay marker, an inferential marker, and an emotive interjection, yaani as an emphasis and elaborative marker, while pole is an attitudinal marker that expresses sympathy and sarcasm. While sasa is only an attention marker, sawa is an agreement and attention marker. The paper shows that these borrowed discourse-pragmatic features contribute to the distinctive nature of East African Englishes.

A Pedagogical Perspective to Semantic Features of Nigerian English

The study examined the semantic manifestations of English words in the Nigerian contexts and the implications for teaching in Nigerian secondary and primary education. The data for this study were obtained from Roger Blench’s (2005) Dictionary of Nigerian English (DNE) and Corpus of Global Web-Based English. While lexical items were culled from the dictionary, the contextual usages of the words which were drawn from the dictionary were gathered through the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. Using a lexical semantic approach, the study compared Standard English and Nigerian English by accounting for semantic shifts, semantic extensions, and morphologically marked neologisms in Nigerian English. Nigerians rarely utilize NE words that represent complete semantic shifts from BrE meanings. Unlike the 'total shift' situation, there is a disparity in the general usage of words to manifest NE extended meaning. The conclusion from the study is that, as it is evident that the English spoken in Nigeria is not the same as British English or American English, examination bodies’ insistence on BrE and AmE is futile and unreasonable. Nigerian English should be recognised by examination agencies; it should be developed and adopted as the Language of pedagogy for primary and secondary education in Nigeria.

Borrowed Discourse-Pragmatic Features in Kenyan English

This article explores five discourse-pragmatic features—si, sijui, eish, kumbe, and kweli—which are borrowed from African languages into Kenyan English, in order to examine their sources, meanings, frequencies, spelling adaptation, collocational patterns, positioning, syntactic distribution, and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are extracted from the Kenyan components of the International Corpus of English-East Africa and the Global Web-based English corpus, are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, from a postcolonial corpus pragmatic framework. The results show that the borrowed discourse-pragmatic features are infrequent, orthographically stable, favour clause-initial position, and rarely co-occur with other discourse-pragmatic features. Si, sijui, and kweli are pragmatic markers used to request confirmation of shared knowledge, indicate uncertainty, and emphasise the truth value in a proposition, respectively. Eish and kumbe are interjections which are mainly used to express emotions of irritation and surprise, respectively. This study extends the research on the discourse-pragmatic features of Kenyan English.

Afrikaans discourse-pragmatic features in South African English

This study discusses the use of six Afrikaans discourse-pragmatic features – ag, ja, mos, né, nogal, and sommer - in South African English, with a view to exploring their meanings, frequencies, syntactic positioning, syntactic distribution, collocational patterns, and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data, which are extracted from the South African component of the corpus of Global Web-based English, are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, using the theories of pragmatic borrowing and Fusion. The paper shows that ja is the most frequent discourse-pragmatic feature while sommer is the least used among these features. The paper also reveals that ja is used to show agreement, emphasise one’s own message, signal recollection of one’s own discourse, show understanding of an interlocutor’s message and it is used as an exclamation that indicates interest in a matter. Né functions as a question tag, while ag expresses emotions of irritation, resignation, sympathy, pleasure, dislike, disappointment, and lack of knowledge. Mos affirms or emphasises knowledge that is shared while nogal emphasises something as a remarkable thing; sommer signals something that is a simpler or obvious solution to a matter. In all, the study foregrounds the influence of Afrikaans on South African English at the discourse-pragmatic level.

On the Rise and Diffusion of New Intensifiers: This and That in Some Asian Varieties of English

The intensifiers this and that acquired their intensifying function as a result of a grammaticalization process by means of which deictic demonstratives became degree adverbs with the meaning “to this or that extent, so much, so.” The phenomenon spread in the early nineteenth century as a typical resource of spoken English, and since then these intensifiers have found a niche in the written domain by imposing a scalar construal on adjectives for which scale is not the default. Even though these intensifiers are observed in practically all the varieties of English around the world, they predominate in American English, with its use in all the other inner circle varieties lagging well behind. In the outer circle varieties, the construction is also subject to some geographical preferences. The present article has two objectives: to evaluate the role and distribution of this and that as intensifiers in selected Asian varieties of English and to analyze the lexicosemantic structure of their right-hand collocates in terms of word class and mode of construal. The study demonstrates, firstly, the existence of different stages of grammaticalization of this and that, the latter having a wider repertoire of collocates; and secondly, an ongoing process of colloquialization and Americanization of the phenomenon, which is contributing to its growing diffusion in the outer circle varieties of English. The evidence comes from the Indian, Hong Kong, Singaporean and Philippines components of the Corpus of Global Web-based English.

Hypercorrection in English: an intervarietal corpus-based study

This article aims to provide a fresh approach to the study of hypercorrection, the misguided application of a real or imagined rule – typically in response to prescriptive pressure – in which the speaker's attempt to be ‘correct’ leads to an ‘incorrect’ result. Instead of more familiar sources of information on hypercorrection such as attitude elicitation studies and prescriptive commentary, insights are sought from quantitative and qualitative data extracted from the 2-billion-word Global Web-based English corpus (GloWbE; Davies 2013). Five categories are investigated: case-marked pronouns, -lyand non-lyadverbs, agreement with number-transparent nouns, (extended uses of) irrealiswere, and ‘hyperforeign’ noun suffixation. The nature and extent of hypercorrection in these categories, across the twenty English varieties represented in GloWbE, are investigated and discussed. Findings include a tendency for hypercorrection to be more common in American than in British English, and more prevalent in the ‘Inner Circle’ (IC) than in the ‘Outer Circle’ (OC) varieties (particularly with established constructions which have been the target of institutionalised prescriptive commentary over a long period of time).

EVENT-CANCELLING SEMANTICS OF THE ENGLISH ASPECTUALIZER START AND ITS SERBIAN EQUIVALENT KRENUTI

The paper revisits the issue of semantic equivalency of two aspectual verbs, start and krenuti, which is proposed by xxx (2021a, 2021b). The present analysis focuses on the causative and dynamic semantic features of start and krenuti, with the aim of a contrastive analysis of the aspectual constructions headed by these two verbs. It is shown that both start and krenuti, provided that the necessary linguistic conditions are met, have the ability to “cancel” the event initiated via constructional phase modification. The conditions for such event-cancelling result from the lexical semantics of start and krenuti, as well as from the semantic co-composition on the level of the aspectual construction as a whole. The theoretical frame of the analysis is the presupposition and consequence account by A. Freed (1979). The contrastive analysis and presented theoretical conclusions are backed by a parallel corpus of 200 English and Serbian sentences compiled from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GlowBE 2013) and the Corpus of Contemporary Serbian Language (SrpKor 2013).
 Key words: aspectualizers, aspectual constructions, aspectual event, temporal structure, presupposition and consequence, event-cancelling

The Variations in Verb-Preposition Combinations in the GloWbE Corpus and Its Usage in Informal Englishes

This paper is based on the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE) which was compiled by Mark Davies in 2013. The GloWbE corpus consists of web data from 20 different English speaking countries. This research is constructed on the GloWbE corpus to investigate the variations in certain verb-preposition combinations in informal Englishes. As the corpus is divided into two sections, such as – general and blog, this study is based on the blog section to compare web data from two inner circle countries such as The USA and Great Britain and two outer circle countries such as – India and Bangladesh. The reason for selecting the blog is that, in the GloWbE corpus, blog section consists of informal data, whereas general section consists of formal data. It is to be noted that the inner circle countries use English as their native tongue, whereas the outer circle countries use English as their second or foreign language. This paper argues that, the verb-preposition combinations or prepositional verbs vary in their frequency and meaning in the aforementioned countries and this paper investigates the following five prepositional verbs from The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language proposed by Huddleston and Pullum in 2002– come up with, look out for, put up with, stand up to, and get along with in the GloWbE corpus to prove that the frequency and meaning of these phrases varies from country to country based on social, cultural and political contexts as seen in the results. The investigation specifically shows the trends of the above five prepositional verbs in the four countries.