ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 พ.ย. 2024
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Robert Fuchs' presentation on "Retracing the Diachronic Development of Indian English - A Tale of two Strands?" at the 2022 ISLE summer school
Abstract
Research on postcolonial varieties of English (PCEs) has long been concerned with the synchronic analysis of their structure and the social context of their usage. Differences between varieties are often explained with reference to a set of competing mechanisms, including historical and contemporary L1 transfer (“substrate”), heterogenous historical English input (“superstrate”) and the evolutionary dynamics of PCEs. Recent research has attempted to elucidate these mechanisms further through an analysis of diachronic data (e.g. Brato 2018; Collins et al. 2014), but so far the breadth and depth of the available diachronic data and analyses are limited.
This talk will outline the rationale for the compilation of a 6.9 million word corpus comprising newspaper articles from 1780 to the present day, with the aim of retracing the historical development of Indian English. A unique feature of this approach is that it contrasts newspapers written by members of the indigenous strand of IndE (i.e. Indians with an English-medium education) with the settler strand (i.e. British people in India), which are in turn compared to British English. This design facilitates an analysis of language variation and change in Indian English and allows researchers to put to the test models such as Edgar Schneider’s Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes (Schneider 2007). A central question the analysis will try to answer is to what extent the indigenous and settler strands of IndE, as well as British English, differed from each over the course of their development, and where traces of linguistic influence from one (sub-)variety on another can be found.
Readings
Brato, T. 2018. ‘‘Outdooring’ the historical corpus of English in Ghana: Insights from the compilation of a historical corpus of New English’. English Today 34: 25-34.
Collins, P., Borlongan, A. M. and Yao, X. 2014. ‘Modality in Philippine English. A diachronic study’. Journal of English Linguistics 42: 68-88.
Fuchs, R. 2020. ‘The progressive in 19th and 20th century settler and indigenous Indian English‘. World Englishes 39: 394-410.
Schneider, E. W. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties around the world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
