Verb-complementational profiles across varieties of English: Comparing verb classes in Indian English and British English

Abstract

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 Hoffmann (2006) have shown in recent corpus-based pilot studies that there are also significant differences between Indian and British English in the complementation of ditransitive verbs. In the present paper, we will make use of a large web-derived corpus of Indian English newspapers and extend the analysis of verb complementation in Indian and British English from ditransitive verbs to a semantically and syntactically related class of verbs. Specifically, we will analyse some verbs that are typically associated with the ‘transfer-caused-motion construction’ (cf. Goldberg 1995), which we refer to as ‘TCM-related verbs’. Our findings show that Indian English also displays some interesting deviations from the verb-complementational profile of British English with regard to TCM-related verbs, which raises some more general questions about divergent transitivity trends in the two varieties.

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