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Agreement in Educated Jamaican English: a Corpus Investigation of ICE-Jamaica

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Agreement in Educated Jamaican English: a Corpus Investigation of ICE-Jamaica Agreement in Educated Jamaican English: A Corpus Investigation of ICE-Jamaica Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philologischen Fakultät der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg i. Br. vorgelegt von Susanne Jantos aus Räckelwitz SS 2009 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Christian Mair Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Bernd Kortmann Vorsitzende des Promotionsausschusses der Gemeinsamen Kommission der Philologischen, Philosophischen und Wirtschafts- und Verhaltenswissenschaftlichen Fakultät: Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Cheauré Datum der Fachprüfung im Promotionsfach: 09.11.2009 Contents 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................1 2 Background to the Study ............................................................................................4 2.1 The Jamaican Language Situation......................................................................... 4 2.1.1 Historical Development of the Language Situation in Jamaica ....................5 2.1.2 New Englishes – Classification and Development......................................12 2.1.3 Linguistic Variation in New Englishes and Underlying Principles.............20 2.2 Linguistic Variation in Jamaica...........................................................................23 2.2.1 The Creole Continuum ................................................................................ 23 2.2.2 Morphosyntactic Characteristics of Jamaican English................................27 3 Previous Research on Subject-Verb Agreement .................................................... 32 3.1 Agreement with Lexical Verbs............................................................................ 38 3.2 Agreement with the Verb BE .............................................................................. 43 4 Register Variation in Subject-Verb Agreement in Educated Jamaican English 46 4.1 Introduction .........................................................................................................46 4.2 Data and Methodology ........................................................................................47 4.2.1 Data – The International Corpus of English................................................47 4.2.2 Register-Choice for the Study of Intra-Corpus Variation ...........................49 4.2.3 Methodology – Analysis of the Registers ...................................................60 4.3 Results for Spoken Jamaican English.................................................................. 63 4.3.1 Agreement with Lexical Verbs.................................................................... 63 4.3.2 Agreement with the Verb BE .......................................................................83 4.3.3 Conclusion – Subject-Verb Agreement in Spoken Jamaican English.........92 4.4 Results for Written Jamaican English ................................................................. 96 4.4.1 Agreement with Lexical Verbs.................................................................... 96 4.4.2 Agreement with the Verb BE .....................................................................110 4.4.3 Conclusion – Subject-Verb Agreement in Written Jamaican English ......115 4.5 Spoken and Written English Compared ............................................................118 4.6 Conclusion.........................................................................................................127 5 Agreement in Existential There + Be Constructions in a Cross-Variety Perspective........................................................................................................................ 130 5.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................130 5.2 Previous Research on Existential There + Be Constructions ............................131 5.3 Data and Methodology ......................................................................................135 5.3.1 Data – Variety-Choice for the Study of Inter-Corpus Variation ...............137 5.3.2 Methodology..............................................................................................147 5.4 Agreement in ETBs in Native and Non-Native Varieties of English................148 5.4.1 Agreement in the Varieties........................................................................ 148 5.4.2 Situational Factors.....................................................................................149 5.4.3 Subject Number.........................................................................................152 5.4.4 Tense..........................................................................................................154 5.4.5 Contractedness...........................................................................................156 5.4.6 Polarity ......................................................................................................159 5.5 Summary............................................................................................................162 6 Existential Constructions........................................................................................ 165 6.1 Expressing Existence.........................................................................................165 6.2 Existential Constructions in the Substrates ....................................................... 172 6.3 Existential Constructions in Varieties of English..............................................176 6.4 Discussion – Universal Tendencies or Language Contact? ..............................185 6.5 Conclusion.........................................................................................................188 7 Concluding Remarks...............................................................................................190 Appendix ..................................................................................................................202 References.................................................................................................................205 Zusammenfassung in deutscher Sprache .............................................................216 ii List of Tables 1. Implicational scale – variable features of Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English 26 2. Spoken and written text categories included ......................................................... 50 3. Characteristics of the selected registers.................................................................. 59 4. Distribution of lexical verbs across the spoken and written text categories .......... 63 5. Distribution of agreement and non-agreement with lexical verbs in the spoken registers .................................................................................................................. 64 6. Logistic regression for grammatical non-agreement and formality (spoken) ....... 81 7. Distribution of the verb be across the spoken and written text categories ............. 83 8. Distribution of agreement and non-agreement with be in the spoken registers ..... 83 9. Distribution of agreement and non-agreement with lexical verbs in the written registers ...................................................................................................... 96 10. Logistic regression for grammatical non-agreement and formality (written) ..... 108 11. Distribution of agreement and non-agreement with be in the written registers ... 110 12. Agreement and non-agreement with lexical verbs in spoken and written Jamaican English .................................................................................................. 118 13. Agreement and non-agreement with be in spoken and written Jamaican English 120 14. Complex noun phrases and proximity agreement in spoken and written Jamaican English .................................................................................................. 125 15. Demographic characteristics and languages most frequently spoken at home in Singapore in the year 2000................................................................................... 138 16. The five scheduled languages with the highest numbers of mother tongue speakers in the 2001 census of India .................................................................... 144 17. Distribution of agreement and non-agreement in existential there + be constructions......................................................................................................... 148 18. Non-agreement with full versus contracted verb forms in category S1A ............ 158 19. Non-agreement by negation type.......................................................................... 162 iii List of Figures 1. Map of creole languages of the northern Caribbean................................................. 4 2. Kachru’s concentric circles of English................................................................... 15 3. Grammatical non-agreement by subject number (spoken) .................................... 65 4. Type of non-agreement across three levels of formality (spoken) ........................ 67 5. Potential explanations of non-agreement involving absence of –s marking across formality levels (spoken) ............................................................................ 69 6. Agreement and non-agreement with do for singular subjects in the spoken data .. 76 7. a. Most frequent verbs in direct conversations..............................................
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