Investigating cross-linguistic influence on relative clause structures in Indian English through a corpus-based approach

• Main Author: Anil, Akshay
• Other Authors: Scott Reid Moisik
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities; Social Sciences; Corpus linguistics; Relative clause; Indian English
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/174276
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In this paper, I explore the effects of language background on English spoken in India, in order to distinguish regional varieties of Indian English through morphological patterns. Research distinguishing South Asian Englishes on the basis of morphological differences is sparse, and this study aims to detect if substrate influence from mother tongue can make a significant difference. Analysing the International Corpus of English - India or ICE-IND, I conducted a analysis on the frequency of the three main relative clause types identified – namely, wh-pronouns, ‘that’ and zero-relativisation. A linear regression model was used to model the effects of language background and education level. Both were flagged as significant variables in the prediction of relative clause frequency across all three types of relative clauses. A k-means cluster analysis was also conducted and showed clusters with inclination towards certain demographics.