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Chapter 6 - The Role of Gender in Postcolonial Syntactic Choice-Making

Evidence from the Genitive Alternation in British and Sri Lankan English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2020

By
Stefan Th. Gries ,
Benedikt Heller  and
Nina Funke
Edited by
Tobias Bernaisch
Tobias Bernaisch
Affiliation:
Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany
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Summary

This paper studies the genitive alternation in British English and Sri Lankan English on the basis of more than 4,000 annotated cases of of- and s-genitives from the British and Sri Lankan components of the International Corpus of English. Specifically, we explore the effects of a variety of language-internal and language-external effects, focusing in particular on how these factors affect genitive choices both on their own, but also in interaction with each other and, a first in this kind of variety research, with the gender of the speakers. Our results corroborate previous findings regarding the language-internal factors, but we also obtain a variety of statistical effects representing interactions of those with variety and gender: for instance, animacy effects are stronger in Sri Lankan English, but animacy and length/weight effects are moderated by speaker gender; we discuss these and other findings with regard to processing, language contact and gender (in-)equality. Methodologically, we are developing two innovations for variationist research, namely a principled way to identify and then also visualise the effect of interactions in random forests.

Keywords

Sri Lankan EnglishBritish Englishgenitive alternationconditional random forestsocial rolesL1 transferWorld Englishesgendercorpus linguisticsmultifactorial statistics
Type
Chapter
Information
Gender in World Englishes , pp. 121 - 146
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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