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Article published In: English World-Wide
Vol. 39:1 (2018) ► pp.85–110

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Pronoun omission in high-contact varieties of English

Complexity versus efficiency

 | University of Santiago de Compostela
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 1 February 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00004.tam
Abstract
This paper considers pronoun omission in different varieties of English. It argues that omitted pronouns simplify structures if their referents are accessible in discourse, which explains the greater frequency of this grammatical feature in high-contact varieties of English, spoken in speech communities with a history of high numbers of second-language users. A corpus study of two high-contact varieties, Indian English and Singapore English, and a low-contact one, British English, is conducted in order to examine the distribution of omitted and overt pronouns. As expected, pronoun omission is more frequent in the high-contact varieties than in British English. Moreover, pronouns are omitted almost exclusively when they have highly accessible referents as antecedents, which is not a conventionalized feature of the grammars of Indian or Singapore English, where overt pronouns are the default choice when referring to antecedents.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Pronoun omission
  • 3.Linguistic complexity
    • 3.1Metrics of grammatical complexity: What do simple and complex mean?
    • 3.2Hawkins’ metric of communicative efficiency
    • 3.3Complexity, efficiency, and contact
  • 4.Pronoun omission in varieties of English
  • 5.Materials and methodology
  • 6.Results
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
References (42)
Sources
International Corpus of English – the Indian Component. 2002. Project Coordinated by Prof. S. V. Shastri at Shivaji University, India, and Prof. Dr. Gerhard Leitner at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Available online at <[URL]>
International Corpus of English – the Singaporean Component. 2002. Project Coordinated by Prof. Paroo Nihilani, Dr. Ni Yibin, Dr. Anne Pakir and Dr. Vincent Ooi at The National University of Singapore, Singapore. Available online at <[URL]>
Kortmann, Bernd, and Kerstin Lunkenheimer, eds. 2013. The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology <[URL]> (accessed October 20, 2014).
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