{"title":"An exploratory investigation of functional variation in South Asian online Englishes","authors":"Muhammad Shakir","doi":"10.1017/s1360674324000017","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article conducts an exploratory multidimensional (MD) analysis of four interactive online registers, namely newspaper comments, tweets, web forums and text messages, originating from four South Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and two Inner Circle (Kachru 1985) English-speaking countries (UK and USA). A principal component analysis (PCA) has been performed on the interactive registers using linguistic features tagged by a modified version of the MFTE tagger (Le Foll 2021a). The dimensions resulting from the PCA show that nominal, literate and informational features are generally more common in the South Asian data – which represent varieties belonging to the Outer Circle (Kachru 1985). Additionally, different features are used for expressing persuasion or opinion compared to the two reference varieties.</p>","PeriodicalId":45748,"journal":{"name":"English Language & Linguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"English Language & Linguistics","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1360674324000017","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article conducts an exploratory multidimensional (MD) analysis of four interactive online registers, namely newspaper comments, tweets, web forums and text messages, originating from four South Asian countries (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and two Inner Circle (Kachru 1985) English-speaking countries (UK and USA). A principal component analysis (PCA) has been performed on the interactive registers using linguistic features tagged by a modified version of the MFTE tagger (Le Foll 2021a). The dimensions resulting from the PCA show that nominal, literate and informational features are generally more common in the South Asian data – which represent varieties belonging to the Outer Circle (Kachru 1985). Additionally, different features are used for expressing persuasion or opinion compared to the two reference varieties.
期刊介绍:
English Language and Linguistics, published twice a year, is an international journal which focuses on the description of the English language within the framework of contemporary linguistics. The journal is concerned equally with the synchronic and the diachronic aspects of English language studies and publishes articles of the highest quality which make a substantial contribution to our understanding of the structure and development of the English language and which are informed by a knowledge and appreciation of linguistic theory. English Language and Linguistics carries articles and short discussion papers or squibs on all core aspects of English, from its beginnings to the present day, including syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics and lexis.