Colonial lag or feature retention in postcolonial varieties of English

Abstract

The term “colonial lag” has been used to refer to the loss of a language feature in an ancestor variety, while the same feature is maintained in a (post)colonial variety derived from it. Recent research has been very critical of this concept, suggesting that it plays a role only at very specific points in the development of postcolonial varieties, if at all. The present study’s goal is to show that colonial lag (or, to use a more neutral term, “feature retention”) can play an important role in the development of specific linguistic features of postcolonial varieties of English. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that colonial lag/feature retention is mediated by substrate influence, the sociolinguistic history of the use of English in a specific country or context, and influence between postcolonial varieties. The results, derived from several corpora, show that the negative scalar conjunction and that too is a case of colonial lag/feature retention in Indian English, and has been retained to variable degrees in other South Asian varieties, from where it might have spread to South-East Asian varieties.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.