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Crossing Boundaries through Corpora: Innovative corpus approaches within and beyond linguistics
Edited by Sarah Buschfeld, Patricia Ronan, Theresa Neumaier, Andreas Weilinghoff and Lisa Westermayer
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 119] 2024
► pp. 192–216

Chapter 8
Short-term diachronic and variety-internal approaches to textual functionality in South Asian Englishes

Evidence from newspaper language

| Justus Liebig University Giessen
| Technische Universität Dresden
To empirically trace functional characteristics of texts such as speaker/writer involvement, narrativity or persuasiveness with a view to potential (a) intra-national variability in Indian English and (b) short-term diachronic change in South Asian Englishes, the South Asian Varieties of English (SAVE) corpus, its updated version SAVE2020, and the Corpus of Regional Indian Newspaper Englishes (CORINNE) are subjected to Multidimensional Analysis (MDA, Biber 1988) as implemented in Nini (2019). A hierarchical cluster analysis of the respective MDA scores reveals the tendency of mesolectal Indian Englishes as well as acrolectal Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan English to employ features of a conceptually written nature more readily than acrolectal Indian, Maldivian, Nepali, and Pakistani English. Still, in the observed time span of 15 years, the acrolects of South Asian Englishes also develop towards conceptually written language.
Keywords: South Asian Englishes, Indian Englishes, MDA, diachrony, corpus linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.South Asian Englishes: Uniformity and plurality
  • 3.Regional variation in newspaper language
  • 4.Corpora and methods
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 October 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.119.08tob
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