Relatives worldwide

Abstract

This chapter investigates relativization strategies in Nigerian, Jamaican, Philippine and Singapore English in order to test claims of reduced stylistic variability and an influence of norm-orientation in these New Englishes. Based on an analysis of these four International Corpus of English subcorpora it was shown that the New Englishes share a large number of relativization strategies. Some differences across them were found in terms of relative marker choice. All four varieties of English exhibit systematic variation of relativization strategies with text types, but this is less pronounced in Nigerian and Philippine English, the two varieties whose norm-orientation is more external and where a local standard form of English has not yet been established. Keywords: relativization; stylistic variation; relative pronoun choice; pied-piping; norm-orientation

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