RT Journal Article
T1 Pronoun omission in high-contact varieties of English. Complexity versus efficiency
A1 Tamaredo Meira, Iván
K1 Pronoun omission
K1 Complexity
K1 Efficiency
K1 Contact
K1 Varieties of English
K1 Indian English
K1 Singapore English
K1 British English
AB This paper considers pronoun omission in different varieties of English. It arguesthat omitted pronouns simplify structures if their referents are accessible indiscourse, which explains the greater frequency of this grammatical feature inhigh-contact varieties of English, spoken in speech communities with a historyof high numbers of second-language users. A corpus study of two high-contactvarieties, Indian English and Singapore English, and a low-contact one, BritishEnglish, is conducted in order to examine the distribution of omitted and overtpronouns. As expected, pronoun omission is more frequent in the high-contactvarieties than in British English. Moreover, pronouns are omitted almost exclusivelywhen they have highly accessible referents as antecedents, which is not aconventionalized feature of the grammars of Indian or Singapore English, whereovert pronouns are the default choice when referring to antecedents
PB John Benjamins
SN 0172-8865
YR 2018
FD 2018-02-01
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/17631
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/17631
LA eng
NO Tamaredo, I. (2018). Pronoun omission in high-contact varieties of English. English World-Wide, 39(1), 85-110. doi: 10.1075/eww.00004.tam
NO For generous financial support, I am grateful to the European Regional Development Fund andthe following institutions: Regional Government of Galicia (Directorate General for Scientificand Technological Promotion, grant GPC 2014/004); Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grants FFI2014-51873-REDT, FFI2014-52188-P and BES-2015-071233)
DS Minerva
RD 24 abr 2026