Focus particles in Indian English and other varieties

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper studies the Indian English use of clause‐final focus particlesalsoandonlyin sentences such as ‘He doesn't listen only’ (ICE‐IND) in order to see if this use has spread to Singapore, Philippine or Hong Kong English. The data for these Asian varieties was obtained from the International Corpus of English and the British and American varieties were added for point of reference. Although the main focus of this quantitative study is on the syntactic analysis of the data, some semantic aspects are also discussed. The results suggest that the Indian English way of placing focus particles in a clause‐final position could be a local innovation which has today spread to Singapore, Philippine and possibly to Hong Kong English. In addition, the data was analysed for all subcategories of ICE, which reveals that the frequencies for this use correlate positively with the level of informality of the speech situation in all four Asian varieties, whereas the results for British English suggest the opposite. Thus, the results indicate that clause‐final focus particles have acquired some additional uses, especially in spoken Indian English, and that these features have now spread to other English varieties spoken in Southeast Asia. The paper suggests that the cause for this can be found from the centuries‐old role that India has had as a cultural force in the Southeast Asian region.

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