Pluralized non-count nouns across Englishes: A corpus-linguistic approach to variety types

Abstract

This corpus-based study of pluralized non-count nouns (informations, advices, etc.) uses collocation-derived measures (determiners vs. bare noun and mass quantifiers) to extract potential candidates of non-count nouns in a bottom-up approach from the British National Corpus (BNC), allowing the detection of grammatical categories from distributional features. We then use this token list to retrieve data on pluralization of non-counts from nine annotated components of the International Corpus of English (ICE). While the distinction between count and non-count nouns is gradient rather than categorical, it is still possible to distinguish between standard and non-standard pluralization of non-counts. Qualitative analyses of our data show that non-standard pluralization of non-count nouns is regularly attested in second-language varieties, including previously unrecorded types; however, it is also occasionally found in first-language varieties. We discuss implications of our corpus results for common explanations of pluralized non-count nouns, such as substrate influence, language learning effects and historical input. By combining a bottom-up corpus-based approach with fine-grained qualitative analyses we can provide a more nuanced view of pluralization of non-counts across ENL and ESL for the investigation of World Englishes.

‘It Looks Weird to Me.’: Attitudes Towards Standard Usage and Variant Use in Present-Day English

“…Lieberman et al (2007), based on a corpus study of inflectional changes in irregular verbs, predict that many irregular verbs, such as break, choose, and draw, are likely to become regularised. Similarly, Schneider et al (2020) found that non-standard pluralisation of uncountable nouns is regularly observed among non-native speakers and also occasionally among native speakers of English. In fact, there are some other corpus studies which have discovered variant forms of standard features, such as sentence-initial conjunctions (Liu, 2008), was-indicative in the unreal subjunctive (Phoocharoensil, 2014), and the indicative verb form in the mandative subjunctive (Grund & Walker, 2006).…”

Corpus-Based Approaches to World Englishes

“…It is advisable to supplement evidence from synchronic corpora with historical data since patterns that are identified as instances of nativization in ESL varieties (e.g. the extension of pluralization to non-counts) may also have precursors in earlier stages of English (Hundt 2016b, Schneider et al, 2019. In other words, for the historical study of WEs, researchers not only need stratified diachronic corpora of ESL varieties to fill in the gaps but ideally also diachronic evidence on regional and nonstandard varieties of English to gauge the effect that different input varieties may have had on the development of WEs.…”

Syntactic variation across the grammar: modelling a complex adaptive system

“…Most corpus-based approaches to syntactic variation choose a single construction to examine and then model variation within that construction alone (Buchstaller, 2008;Grieve, 2012;Schilk and Schaub, 2016;Calle-Martin and Romero-Barranco, 2017;Grafmiller and Szmrecsanyi, 2018;Deshors and Götz, 2020;Schneider et al, 2020;Rautionaho and Hundt, 2022;Xu et al, 2022;Larsson, 2023;Li et al, 2023). While this line of work can reveal small-scale syntactic variation and change, it can never account for grammatical variation.…”