Third person present tense markers in some varieties of English

Abstract

In British Standard English, number in the verb phrase is exclusively characterized by the use of the -sinflection with the third person singular present tense. World Englishes present a high level of variation as the uninflected third person singular and the inflected third person plural may also occur in these contexts. This paper pursues four objectives: a) to analyse the use of present third person inflections and compare their distribution in different varieties of English; b) to assess the occurrence of forms across speech and writing, text categories and the informants’ age and gender; c) to classify the instances by type of subject (nominal vs. pronominal); and d) to evaluate the impact of proximity agreement, notional agreement and the existence of intervening elements in the choice of the inflection. Our evidence comes from the New Zealand, Indian, Singaporean and Hong Kong components of the International Corpus of English.

Global Syntactic Variation in Seven Languages: Toward a Computational Dialectology

“…Even though these international languages have global speech communities, dialectology and sociolinguistics continue to focus largely on sub-national dialects, often within so-called inner-circle varieties (Kachru, 1982). This paper joins recent work in taking a global approach by using geo-referenced texts (Goldhahn et al, 2012;Davies and Fuchs, 2015;Donoso and Sanchez, 2017) to represent national varieties (Szmrecsanyi et al, 2016;Calle-Martin and Romero-Barranco, 2017;Cook and Brinton, 2017;Rangel et al, 2017;Dunn, 2018aDunn, , 2019bTamaredo, 2018). The basic point is that in order to represent regional variation as a complete system, dialectometry must take a global perspective.…”

“…Most previous work relies on phonetic or phonological features (Kretzschmar, 1992 , 1996 ; Heeringa, 2004 ; Labov et al, 2005 ; Nerbonne, 2006 , 2009 ; Grieve et al, 2011 , 2013 ; Wieling and Nerbonne, 2011 , 2015 ; Grieve, 2013 ; Nerbonne and Kretzschmar, 2013 ; Kretzschmar et al, 2014 ; Kruger and van Rooy, 2018 ) for the simple reason that phonetic representations are relatively straight-forward: a vowel is a vowel and the measurements are the same across varieties and languages. Previous work on syntactic variation has focused on either (i) an incomplete set of language-specific variants, ranging from only a few features to hundreds (Sanders, 2007 , 2010 ; Szmrecsanyi, 2009 , 2013 , 2014 ; Grieve, 2011 , 2012 , 2016 ; Collins, 2012 ; Schilk and Schaub, 2016 ; Szmrecsanyi et al, 2016 ; Calle-Martin and Romero-Barranco, 2017 ; Grafmiller and Szmrecsanyi, 2018 ; Tamaredo, 2018 ) or (ii) language-independent representations such as function words (Argamon and Koppel, 2013 ) or sequences of part-of-speech labels (Hirst and Feiguina, 2007 ; Kroon et al, 2018 ). This forces a choice between either an ad hoc and incomplete syntactic representation or a reproducible but indirect syntactic representation.…”

Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in English Using Dialect Classification

“…In spite of the global character of English, dialectology and sociolinguistics continue to focus largely on sub-national dialects of En-glish within so-called inner-circle varieties (for example, Labov, et al, 2016;Strelluf, 2016;Schreier, 2016;Clark & Watson, 2016). This paper joins recent work in taking a global approach by using geo-referenced texts to represent national varieties (e.g., Dunn, 2018c;Tamaredo, 2018;Calle-Martin & Romero-Barranco, 2017;Szmrecsanyi, et al, 2016;Sanders, 2010Sanders, , 2007c.f., Davies & Fuchs, 2015). For example, this study of dialect classification contains inner-circle (Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, United States), outer-circle (India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Philippines, Pakistan, South Africa), and expanding-circle (Switzerland, Portugual) varieties together in a single model.…”

Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in

“…In spite of the global character of English, dialectology and sociolinguistics continue to focus largely on sub-national dialects of En-glish within so-called inner-circle varieties (for example , Labov, et al, 2016;Strelluf, 2016;Schreier, 2016;Clark & Watson, 2016). This paper joins recent work in taking a global approach by using geo-referenced texts to represent national varieties (e.g., Dunn, 2018c;Tamaredo, 2018;Calle-Martin & Romero-Barranco, 2017;Szmrecsanyi, et al, 2016;Sanders, 2010Sanders, , 2007 c.f., Davies & Fuchs, 2015). For example, this study of dialect classification contains inner-circle (Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, United States), outer-circle (India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Philippines, Pakistan, South Africa), and expanding-circle (Switzerland, Portugual) varieties together in a single model.…”