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Article published In:
Concentric
Vol. 47:1 (2021) ► pp.93–112

Nativised structural patterns of make light verb construction in Malaysian English

| Universiti Sains Malaysia
| Universiti Sains Malaysia

This study investigated nativised structural patterns of light verb constructions (LVCs) in Malaysian English using a corpus-based, descriptive approach to analyse grammatical innovations. To facilitate the analysis, a 100-million-word general corpus comprising threads from Lowyat.Net, a popular Internet forum in Malaysia, was created, and the British National Corpus (BNC) was used as the reference corpus. Using the Sketch Engine corpus tool, the three most frequently occurring make LVCs in the Malaysian English corpus were identified. The data was analysed to reveal the differences between the structures of make LVC in Malaysian English and its prototypical structure. The findings show that besides the non-isomorphic deverbal noun form, make LVCs in Malaysian English prefer taking the basic constituents of an LVC. Nativised LVCs are essentially those with zero articles and isomorphic deverbal nouns taking definite articles, determiners, and descriptive adjectives in their modifier slots. The zero article LVC is the most common nativised structure pattern due to the influence of substrate languages in Malaysian English.

Keywords: Malaysian English, light verb constructions, LVCs, nativisation, structural pattern
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Light verb constructions
  • 3.Material and method
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Structural patterns of LVCs in Malaysian English
    • 4.2Nativised LVC in Malaysian English
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 19 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/consl.00024.rah
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