A morphosyntactic approach to language contact in African varieties of English

ABSTRACT This study aims to widen our knowledge of substrate influence and language transfer in World Englishes through the study of the verb complementation system of REGRET in four African postcolonial varieties. An examination of the most widely spoken substrates in each variety does not seem to explain the different tendencies in the distribution of finite and nonfinite complementation patterns across varieties, since English varieties with different complementation systems in their substrate languages, Kenyan English and Nigerian English, for example, show similar distributions in their use of English complementation. Such differences in the distribution seem to be the result of other factors playing an essential role in language contact situations, namely, the tendency towards transparency in second language varieties, the geographical proximity of the English varieties, and the evolution of the varieties measured in terms of the Dynamic Model (Schneider 2007).