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Article published In: Linguistic Innovations: Rethinking linguistic creativity in non-native Englishes
Edited by Sandra C. Deshors, Sandra Götz and Samantha Laporte
[International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 2:2] 2016
► pp. 278–301

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Innovative conversions in South-East Asian Englishes

Reassessing ESL status

 | University of Freiburg
Published online: 20 October 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.2.2.07hor
Singapore English and Hong Kong English started out as contact varieties and developed into ESL varieties belonging to the Outer Circle (Kachru 1985). Both varieties show a similar contact ecology (Chinese), but differ in their socio-institutional status in the Dynamic Model (Schneider 2003, 2007). By analyzing innovative verb-to-noun conversion in these two varieties, and comparing them to British English, this study shows that despite the obvious similarities in substratum, the usage frequency of conversion in both varieties differs considerably. These findings, similar to — most recently — Deshors (2014) and Gilquin (2015), call into question the established notion of ESL in general and the status of SgE and HKE as ESL varieties in particular. In order to accurately reflect contemporary language use, it is reasonable to conceptualize the notion of ESL as a continuum and to situate HKE and SgE at opposite ends.
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Cited by (5)

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2020. Common ground across globalized English varieties: A multivariate exploration of mental predicates in World Englishes. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 16:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Deshors, Sandra C. & Gaëtanelle Gilquin
2018. Modeling World Englishes in the 21st century. In Modeling World Englishes [Varieties of English Around the World, G61], ► pp. 281 ff. DOI logo
Deshors, Sandra C.
2017. Structuring subjectivity in Asian Englishes. English Text Construction 10:1 ► pp. 132 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Corpora, Constructions, New Englishes [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 100], DOI logo

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