A corpus-driven description of when-adverbial in Nigerian and British Englishes

Q1 Arts and Humanities

Glottotheory Pub Date : 2021-10-01 DOI:10.1515/glot-2021-2003

Mayowa Akinlotan

{"title":"A corpus-driven description of when-adverbial in Nigerian and British Englishes","authors":"Mayowa Akinlotan","doi":"10.1515/glot-2021-2003","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Syntactic alternation allows us to understand how structural variation, including crucial factors relevant to their meaning and interpretation, operates linguistic varieties. Empirical evidence from such syntactic alternation study can provide insights into how new varieties differ from the established ones. The present study aims at increasing contributions that show the nature of syntactic alternation from new Englishes such as Nigerian English, and how they differ from established varieties such as British English. Taking when adverbial construction in Nigerian English as a reference point (When Trump realised his reelection loss, he changed his political expectations versus Trump changed his political expectations when he realised his reelection loss), the study shows the extent to which previously tested factors influence the ordering of the construction and how they differ from findings reported in British English. Relying on corpus data, together with descriptive distributional analysis, the study shows that, unlike British English in which functional and cognitive factors strongly influence structural patterning, functional factors outweigh cognitive factors in Nigerian English.","PeriodicalId":37792,"journal":{"name":"Glottotheory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Glottotheory","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/glot-2021-2003","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"Arts and Humanities","Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 1

Abstract

Abstract Syntactic alternation allows us to understand how structural variation, including crucial factors relevant to their meaning and interpretation, operates linguistic varieties. Empirical evidence from such syntactic alternation study can provide insights into how new varieties differ from the established ones. The present study aims at increasing contributions that show the nature of syntactic alternation from new Englishes such as Nigerian English, and how they differ from established varieties such as British English. Taking when adverbial construction in Nigerian English as a reference point (When Trump realised his reelection loss, he changed his political expectations versus Trump changed his political expectations when he realised his reelection loss), the study shows the extent to which previously tested factors influence the ordering of the construction and how they differ from findings reported in British English. Relying on corpus data, together with descriptive distributional analysis, the study shows that, unlike British English in which functional and cognitive factors strongly influence structural patterning, functional factors outweigh cognitive factors in Nigerian English.

查看原文本刊更多论文

尼日利亚英语和英国英语中when-状语的语料库描述

摘要句法交替使我们能够理解结构变异，包括与其含义和解释相关的关键因素，是如何操作语言变体的。这种句法交替研究的经验证据可以深入了解新变体与现有变体的区别。本研究旨在增加对尼日利亚英语等新英语句法交替性质的研究，以及它们与英国英语等既定变体的区别。以尼日利亚英语中的when状语结构为参考点（当特朗普意识到自己连任失败时，他改变了政治期望，而特朗普意识到连任失败时改变了政治预期），该研究显示了先前测试的因素对结构顺序的影响程度，以及它们与英国英语中报道的结果有何不同。基于语料库数据，结合描述性分布分析，该研究表明，与功能和认知因素强烈影响结构模式的英国英语不同，尼日利亚英语中的功能因素大于认知因素。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

求助全文

约1分钟内获得全文求助全文

来源期刊

Glottotheory Arts and Humanities-History

CiteScore

0.70

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： The foci of Glottotheory are: observations and descriptions of all aspects of language and text phenomena including the areas of psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, dialectology, pragmatics, etc. on all levels of linguistic analysis, applications of methods, models or findings from quantitative linguistics concerning problems of natural language processing, language teaching, documentation and information retrieval, methodological problems of linguistic measurement, model construction, sampling and test theory, epistemological issues such as explanation of language and text phenomena, contributions to theory construction, systems theory, philosophy of science. The journal considers itself as platform for a dialogue between quantitative and qualitative linguistics.