Indian English Evolution and Focusing Visible Through Power Laws
New dialect emergence and focusing in language contact settings is difficult to capture and date in terms of global structural dialect stabilization. This paper explores whether diachronic power law frequency distributions can provide evidence of dialect evolution and new dialect focusing, by consid...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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MDPI AG
2017-11-01
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| Series: | Languages |
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| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/2/4/26 |
| _version_ | 1798039160460673024 |
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| author | Vineeta Chand Devin Kapper Sumona Mondal Shantanu Sur Rana D. Parshad |
| author_facet | Vineeta Chand Devin Kapper Sumona Mondal Shantanu Sur Rana D. Parshad |
| author_sort | Vineeta Chand |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | New dialect emergence and focusing in language contact settings is difficult to capture and date in terms of global structural dialect stabilization. This paper explores whether diachronic power law frequency distributions can provide evidence of dialect evolution and new dialect focusing, by considering the quantitative frequency characteristics of three diachronic Indian English (IE) corpora (1970s–2008). The results demonstrate that IE consistently follows power law frequency distributions and the corpora are each best fit by Mandelbrot’s Law. Diachronic changes in the constants are interpreted as evidence of lexical and syntactic collocational focusing within the process of new dialect formation. Evidence of new dialect focusing is also visible through apparent time comparison of spoken and written data. Age and gender-separated sub-corpora of the most recent corpus show minimal deviation, providing apparent time evidence for emerging IE dialect stability. From these findings, we extend the interpretation of diachronic changes in the β coefficient—as indicative of changes in the degree of synthetic/analytic structure—so that β is also sensitive to grammaticalization and changes in collocational patterns. |
| first_indexed | 2024-04-11T21:50:04Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-08244cf6a6ce4ea6bab581623194d5c9 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 2226-471X |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-04-11T21:50:04Z |
| publishDate | 2017-11-01 |
| publisher | MDPI AG |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Languages |
| spelling | doaj.art-08244cf6a6ce4ea6bab581623194d5c92022-12-22T04:01:16ZengMDPI AGLanguages2226-471X2017-11-01242610.3390/languages2040026languages2040026Indian English Evolution and Focusing Visible Through Power LawsVineeta Chand0Devin Kapper1Sumona Mondal2Shantanu Sur3Rana D. Parshad4Centre for Research in Language Development throughout the Lifespan (LaDeLi), Department of Languages and Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UKDepartment of Mathematics, Clarkson University, 8 Clarkson Ave., Potsdam, NY 13699-5815, USADepartment of Mathematics, Clarkson University, 8 Clarkson Ave., Potsdam, NY 13699-5815, USADepartment of Biology, Clarkson University, 8 Clarkson Ave., Potsdam, NY 13699-5815, USADepartment of Mathematics, Clarkson University, 8 Clarkson Ave., Potsdam, NY 13699-5815, USANew dialect emergence and focusing in language contact settings is difficult to capture and date in terms of global structural dialect stabilization. This paper explores whether diachronic power law frequency distributions can provide evidence of dialect evolution and new dialect focusing, by considering the quantitative frequency characteristics of three diachronic Indian English (IE) corpora (1970s–2008). The results demonstrate that IE consistently follows power law frequency distributions and the corpora are each best fit by Mandelbrot’s Law. Diachronic changes in the constants are interpreted as evidence of lexical and syntactic collocational focusing within the process of new dialect formation. Evidence of new dialect focusing is also visible through apparent time comparison of spoken and written data. Age and gender-separated sub-corpora of the most recent corpus show minimal deviation, providing apparent time evidence for emerging IE dialect stability. From these findings, we extend the interpretation of diachronic changes in the β coefficient—as indicative of changes in the degree of synthetic/analytic structure—so that β is also sensitive to grammaticalization and changes in collocational patterns.https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/2/4/26language contactpower lawsWorld EnglishIndian Englishdiachroniccorpus linguisticslexical diversitydialect formation |
| spellingShingle | Vineeta Chand Devin Kapper Sumona Mondal Shantanu Sur Rana D. Parshad Indian English Evolution and Focusing Visible Through Power Laws Languages language contact power laws World English Indian English diachronic corpus linguistics lexical diversity dialect formation |
| title | Indian English Evolution and Focusing Visible Through Power Laws |
| title_full | Indian English Evolution and Focusing Visible Through Power Laws |
| title_fullStr | Indian English Evolution and Focusing Visible Through Power Laws |
| title_full_unstemmed | Indian English Evolution and Focusing Visible Through Power Laws |
| title_short | Indian English Evolution and Focusing Visible Through Power Laws |
| title_sort | indian english evolution and focusing visible through power laws |
| topic | language contact power laws World English Indian English diachronic corpus linguistics lexical diversity dialect formation |
| url | https://www.mdpi.com/2226-471X/2/4/26 |
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