RT Journal Article
T1 Syntactic complexity and language contact: A corpus-based study of relative clauses in British English and Indian English
A1 Tamaredo Meira, Iván
K1 syntactic complexity
K1 Language contact
K1 Relative clauses
K1 British English
K1 Indian English
K1 Variation
AB The aim of the present paper is to test the claim that contact simplifieslanguage (cf. Kusters, 2008) by comparing the domain of relative clauseformation in British English, a L1 variety, and Indian English, a L2 variety.According to Hawkins (1999), the processing cost of relativizing a nounphrase increases down the Accessibility Hierarchy (Subject > Direct Object>Indirect Object > Oblique > Genitive> Object of Comparison) proposed byKeenan and Comrie (1977). Subject relative clauses are thus easier to processthan direct object relatives, and so on. The results of a corpus study of theBritish and Indian components of the International Corpus of English showthat the Accessibility Hierarchy has an indirect effect on the production ofrelative clauses in British English and Indian English: whereas thedistribution of relative clauses with respect to the hierarchy is very similar inboth varieties, the number of complex relatives, i.e., with coordination orfurther embedding, decreases in the lower positions in Indian English. Theseresults thus suggest that language contact plays a significant role in relativeclause use and accounts for certain differences between L1 and L2 varietiesof English in this grammatical domain
PB Universidad de Alicante
SN 0214-4808
YR 2017
FD 2017-06-30
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/16623
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/16623
LA eng
NO Tamaredo, I. (2017). Syntactic complexity and language contact: A corpus-based study of relative clauses in British English and Indian English. Revista Alicantina De Estudios Ingleses, 30, 149-182. http://dx.doi.org/10.14198/raei.2017.30.06
NO For generous financial support, I am grateful to the European Regional Development Fund and the following institutions: Regional Government of Galicia (Directorate General for Scientific and Technological Promotion, grant GPC2014/004); Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grants FFI2014-52188-P and BES-2015-071233)
DS Minerva
RD 24 abr 2026