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Article published In: Concentric
Vol. 47:1 (2021) ► pp.93–112

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Nativised structural patterns of make light verb construction in Malaysian English

 | Universiti Sains Malaysia
 | Universiti Sains Malaysia
Published online: 19 April 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/consl.00024.rah
Abstract
This study investigated nativised structural patterns of light verb constructions (LVCs) in Malaysian English using a corpus-based, descriptive approach to analyse grammatical innovations. To facilitate the analysis, a 100-million-word general corpus comprising threads from Lowyat.Net, a popular Internet forum in Malaysia, was created, and the British National Corpus (BNC) was used as the reference corpus. Using the Sketch Engine corpus tool, the three most frequently occurring make LVCs in the Malaysian English corpus were identified. The data was analysed to reveal the differences between the structures of make LVC in Malaysian English and its prototypical structure. The findings show that besides the non-isomorphic deverbal noun form, make LVCs in Malaysian English prefer taking the basic constituents of an LVC. Nativised LVCs are essentially those with zero articles and isomorphic deverbal nouns taking definite articles, determiners, and descriptive adjectives in their modifier slots. The zero article LVC is the most common nativised structure pattern due to the influence of substrate languages in Malaysian English.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Light verb constructions
  • 3.Material and method
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Structural patterns of LVCs in Malaysian English
    • 4.2Nativised LVC in Malaysian English
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Ong, Christina Sook Beng & Hajar Abdul Rahim
2025.  Give, take, and make light verb constructions in mesolectal Malaysian English. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 46:2 ► pp. 213 ff. DOI logo
Giparaitė, Judita
2024. A corpus-based analysis of light verb constructions with MAKE and DO in British English. Kalbotyra 76 ► pp. 18 ff. DOI logo

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