Measuring Linguistic Distance in World EnglishesSubject PronounDeletion in Spoken and Written Language
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Universidade de Vigo
info
- Lourdes López Ropero (coord.)
- Sara Prieto García-Cañedo (coord.)
- José Antonio Sánchez Fajardo (coord.)
Publisher: Universidad de Alicante / Universitat d'Alacant
ISBN: 978-84-1302-079-2
Year of publication: 2020
Pages: 249-261
Congress: Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos. Congreso (43. 2020. Valencia)
Type: Conference paper
Abstract
The present study examines how, and how often, speakers of varieties of English choose between syntactic variants across mediums of production. As a case study, differences in frequency and the constraints determining the choice between overt and deleted pronominal subjects are examined in British, Indian, and Singapore English. To this purpose, relevant observations of the overt and deleted variants were annotated for several language-internal constraints, as well as for medium and variety. Differences in the way in which speakers omit subjects across varieties and mediums were calculated on the basis of (a) the relative frequencies of the variants and (b) the statistical significance, effect strength, and variable importance values of language-internal constraints. Results indicate that speakers of the three varieties delete pronouns differently in spoken than in written language and that, in fact, medium has more explanatory power than variety