The Role of Gender in Postcolonial Syntactic Choice-Making

doi:10.1017/9781108696739.006

Chapter 6 - The Role of Gender in Postcolonial Syntactic Choice-Making

Evidence from the Genitive Alternation in British and Sri Lankan English

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020

Benedikt Heller and

Edited by

Tobias Bernaisch: Affiliation:
Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany

Book contents

Get access

Summary

This paper studies the genitive alternation in British English and Sri Lankan English on the basis of more than 4,000 annotated cases of of- and s-genitives from the British and Sri Lankan components of the International Corpus of English. Specifically, we explore the effects of a variety of language-internal and language-external effects, focusing in particular on how these factors affect genitive choices both on their own, but also in interaction with each other and, a first in this kind of variety research, with the gender of the speakers. Our results corroborate previous findings regarding the language-internal factors, but we also obtain a variety of statistical effects representing interactions of those with variety and gender: for instance, animacy effects are stronger in Sri Lankan English, but animacy and length/weight effects are moderated by speaker gender; we discuss these and other findings with regard to processing, language contact and gender (in-)equality. Methodologically, we are developing two innovations for variationist research, namely a principled way to identify and then also visualise the effect of interactions in random forests.

Keywords

Sri Lankan English British English genitive alternation conditional random forest social roles L1 transfer World Englishes gender corpus linguistics multifactorial statistics

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Gender in World Englishes , pp. 121 - 146

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108696739.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Altenberg, Bengt. 1982. The Genitive v. the of-Construction: A Study of Syntactic Variation in 17th Century English. Lund: Gleerup.Google Scholar

Behaghel, Otto. 1909. ‘Beziehungen zwischen Umfang und Reihenfolge von Satzgliedern’, Indogermanische Forschungen 25: 110–42.Google Scholar

Bernaisch, Tobias. 2012. ‘Attitudes towards Englishes in Sri Lanka’, World Englishes 31(3): 279–91.Google Scholar

Bernaisch, Tobias. 2015. The Lexis and Lexicogrammar of Sri Lankan English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar

Bock, J. Kathryn. 1982. ‘Toward a cognitive psychology of syntax: information processing contributions to sentence formulation’, Psychological Review 89(1): 1–47.CrossRef Google Scholar

Brunner, Thomas. 2014. ‘Structural nativization, typology and complexity: noun phrase structures in British, Kenyan and Singaporean English’, English Language and Linguistics 18(1): 23–48.CrossRef Google Scholar

Chandralal, Dileep. 2010. Sinhala. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar

Deshors, Sandra C. and Gries, Stefan Th. in press. ‘Mandative subjunctive vs. should in world Englishes: a new take on an old alternation’, Corpora.Google Scholar

Fox, John. 2003. ‘Effect displays in R for generalised linear models’, Journal of Statistical Software 8(15): 1–27.Google Scholar

Friedman, Jerome H. 2001. ‘Greedy function approximation: a gradient boosting machine’, Annals of Statistics 29(5): 1189–232.CrossRef Google Scholar

Grafmiller, Jason. 2014. ‘Variation in English genitives across modality and genres’, English Language and Linguistics 18(3): 471–96.CrossRef Google Scholar

Greenbaum, Sidney. 1996. ‘Introducing ICE’. In Greenbaum, Sidney, ed. Comparing English Worldwide: The International Corpus of English. Oxford: Clarendon, 3–12.Google Scholar

Gries, Stefan Th. in press. ‘On classification trees and random forests in corpus linguistics: some words of caution and suggestions for improvement’, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.Google Scholar

Gunesekera, Manique. 2005. The Postcolonial Identity of Sri Lankan English. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications.Google Scholar

Hansen, Beke. 2017. ‘The ICE metadata and the study of Hong Kong English’, World Englishes 36(3): 471–86.Google Scholar

Heller, Benedikt. 2018. Stability and Fluidity in Syntactic Variation World-Wide: The Genitive Alternation across Varieties of English (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.Google Scholar

Heller, Benedikt, Bernaisch, Tobias and Gries, Stefan Th. 2017a. ‘Empirical perspectives on two potential epicenters: the genitive alternation in Asian Englishes’, ICAME Journal 41: 111–44.Google Scholar

Heller, Benedikt, Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt and Grafmiller, Jason. 2017b. ‘Stability and fluidity in syntactic variation world-wide’, Journal of English Linguistics 45(1): 3–27.CrossRef Google Scholar

Hothorn, Torsten, Hornik, Kurt and Zeileis, Achim. 2006. ‘Unbiased recursive partitioning: a conditional inference framework’, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 15(3): 651–74.Google Scholar

Janitza, Silke, Strobl, Carolin and Boulesteix, Anne-Laure. 2013. ‘An AUC-based permutation variable importance measure for random forests’, BMC Bioinformatics 14: 119.Google Scholar

Kachru, Braj B. 1985. ‘Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: the English language in the outer circle’. In Quirk, Randolph and Widdowson, Henry G., eds. English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures. Cambridge University Press, 11–30.Google Scholar

Kendall, Tyler, Bresnan, Joan and van Herk, Gerard. 2011. ‘The dative alternation in African American English: researching syntactic variation and change across sociolinguistic datasets’, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7(2): 229–44.Google Scholar

Künstler, Viktoria, Mendis, Dushyanthi and Mukherjee, Joybrato. 2009. ‘English in Sri Lanka: language functions and speaker attitudes’, International Journal of English Studies 20(2): 57–74.Google Scholar

Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.Google Scholar

MacDonald, Maryellen C. 2013. ‘How language production shapes language form and comprehension’, Frontiers in Psychology 4: 1–16.CrossRef Google Scholar PubMed

Meyler, Michael. 2007. A Dictionary of Sri Lankan English. Colombo: Mirisgala.Google Scholar

Molnar, Christoph. 2018. ‘Interpretable machine learning: a guide for making black box models explainable’ (Manuscript). Retrieved from https://christophm.github.io/interpretable-ml-book/index.html.Google Scholar

Mukherjee, Joybrato. 2008. ‘Sri Lankan English: evolutionary status and epicentral influence from Indian English’. In Stierstorfer, Klaus, ed. Proceedings / Anglistentag 2007 Münster. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 359–68.Google Scholar

Revis, Melanie and Bernaisch, Tobias. 2020. ‘Pragmatic nativisation in Asian Englishes? evidence from filled and unfilled pauses’, World Englishes 39(1): 135–153.Google Scholar

Rosenbach, Anette. 2002. Genitive Variation in English: Conceptual Factors in Synchronic and Diachronic Studies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar

Rosenbach, Anette. 2005. ‘Animacy versus weight as determinants of grammatical variation in English’, Language 81(3): 613–44.CrossRef Google Scholar

Rosenbach, Anette. 2014. ‘English genitive variation – the state of the art’, English Language and Linguistics 18(2): 215–62.Google Scholar

Rosenbach, Anette. 2017. ‘Constraints in contact: animacy in English and Afrikaans genitive variation – a cross-linguistic perspective’, Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2(1): 72. 1–21.Google Scholar

Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Schneider, Edgar W. 2011. English around the World: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2017. ‘Variationist sociolinguistics and corpus-based variationist linguistics: overlap and crosspollination potential’, Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 62(4): 1–17.Google Scholar

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt and Hinrichs, Lars. 2008. ‘Probabilistic determinants of genitive variation in spoken and written English: a multivariate comparison across time, space, and genres’. In Nevalainen, Terttu, Taavitsainen, Irma, Pahta, Päivi and Korhonen, Minna, eds. The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 291–309.CrossRef Google Scholar

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Biber, Douglas, Egbert, Jesse, and Franco, Karlien. 2016. ‘Toward more accountability: modeling ternary genitive variation in Late Modern English’, Language Variation and Change 28(1): 1–29.CrossRef Google Scholar

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt, Grafmiller, Jason, Bresnan, Joan, Rosenbach, Anette, Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Todd, Simon. 2017. ‘Spoken syntax in a comparative perspective: the dative and genitive alternation in varieties of English’, Glossa: a Journal of General Linguistics 2(1): 86. 1–27.CrossRef Google Scholar

Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Baayen, R. Harald. 2012. ‘Models, forests and trees of York English: was/were variation as a case study for statistical practice’, Language Variation and Change 24(2): 135–78.Google Scholar

United Nations Development Programme. 2014. ‘Human development report 2014: sustaining human progress: reducing vulnerabilities and building resilience’ (Manuscript). Retrieved from http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr14-report-en-1.pdf.Google Scholar

Wolk, Christoph, Bresnan, Joan, Rosenbach, Anette and Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2013. ‘Dative and genitive variability in Late Modern English: exploring cross-constructional variation and change’, Diachronica 30(3): 382–419.Google Scholar

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Why this information is here

This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.

Accessibility Information

Accessibility compliance for the HTML of this chapter is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.