N-is Focalizers as Semi-fixed Constructions: Modeling Variation across World Englishes

Abstract

N-is constructions combine a variable article and a shell noun such as thing, fact, or problem with copula be. As discourse markers at the left periphery, they focalize information that follows. Using data from a large online newspaper corpus, this study is the first to investigate the variable syntactic integration (bare versus that-clause) of focalizers across a broad range of World Englishes. Variability in syntactic integration reflects the relative recent emergence of this discourse marker. It is also relevant for World Englishes research because it is at the level of semi-idiomatic constructions that nativization in post-colonial varieties is likely to occur. Corpus data show that syntactic integration in N-is focalizers is predicted most strongly by linguistic variables, with regional variety being a much weaker predictor. While no clear-cut regional or variety-type patterns emerge from the data, qualitative analysis reveals some low-frequency patterns as candidates for structural nativization.