The progressive in South Asian and Southeast Asian varieties of English – mapping areal homogeneity and heterogeneity

Abstract

In the present study we use the South Asian and Southeast Asian components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) as well as a larger set of web-derived newspaper corpora in order to account for similarities and differences in the use of the progressive in eight non-native varieties of English (Singapore, Hong Kong, Indian, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, Maldivian, Nepali and Pakistani English). The analysis is two-fold: First, for the varieties under scrutiny, we provide a quantitative overview of the different use of progressive aspect marking according to tense and voice. Second, we apply a cluster analysis in order to determine respective variety-based clusters so that a comparison of those verbs of which progressive aspect marking is said to differ most significantly will be feasible. In a third step we present examples of some of the most influential verbs that are responsible for the differences in use across the corpora.

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