Though generally considered a non-rhotic variety, New Zealand English (NZE) shows some variation in terms of rhotic vowel colouring, mainly observed in southern New Zealand speakers. The current study uses an acoustic approach to a new audio-visual database, the UC Canterbury QuakeBox (Walsh… read more
The noun phrase (NP) is at the heart of several studies investigating regional variation in varieties of English. While so far the bulk of research has focused on isolated structural features, the present study is a comparative analysis of NP complexity across varieties of English. NP complexity… read more
It has been noted that the study of the interface between lexis and grammar in general and verb-complementational patterns and preferences in particular offers new insights into distinctive and so far largely neglected structures of varieties of English. Based on data from the International Corpus… read more
In this pilot study we set out to compare formulaic sequences of the type of 3-grams in ENL (spoken British English), EFL (English spoken by advanced German learners of English) and ESL (spoken Indian English). The study shows that, for the overall number of types and tokens, there are no… read more
It has been frequently noted that many characteristic features of New Englishes tend to cluster around the interface between lexis and grammar. Focusing on present-day standard Indian English, the largest second-language variety of English, Olavarría de Ersson and Shaw (2003) and Mukherjee and… read more