The Effects of Structure and Proficiency on Determiner Number (Dis)agreement in the Nigerian English Noun Phrase

8 pages•Published: November 28, 2016

Abstract

The paper investigates the extent to which the grammatical number (dis)agreement hypothesis in the New Englishes (Platt et al 1984, Gorlach 1998, Mesthrie et al 2008) manifests in the determiner system of the Nigerian English, and how the variables of proficiency, text type, register, structural complexity, and syntactic form influence scenarios found. Applying principle of accountability (Labov 1972, Tagliamonte 2012), together with test statistic on data drawn from the Nigeria-ICE, we showed that in Nigerian determiner system, grammatical number is likely to agree (98%) with the head noun of the noun phrase than to disagree (2%). Also, the disagreement is mainly influenced by complexity and proficiency. This number irregularity is more likely to occur with the use of quantifier or demonstrative than with indefinite article. We argue that this scenario suggests a manifestation of fossilisation by transferring from the syntactically unique determiner systems of the local Nigerian languages to Nigerian English.

Keyphrases: determiner system, grammatical number, new englishes, nigerian english, noun phrase, structural pattern

In: Antonio Moreno Ortiz and Chantal Pérez-Hernández (editors). CILC2016. 8th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics, vol 1, pages 1-8.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/SJW2
	https://doi.org/10.29007/vqjj

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{CILC2016:Effects_Structure_Proficiency_Determiner,
  author    = {Mayowa Akinlotan},
  title     = {The Effects of Structure and Proficiency on Determiner Number (Dis)agreement in the Nigerian English Noun Phrase},
  booktitle = {CILC2016. 8th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics},
  editor    = {Antonio Moreno Ortiz and Chantal Pérez-Hernández},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Language and Linguistics},
  volume    = {1},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2398-5283},
  url       = {/publications/paper/SJW2},
  doi       = {10.29007/vqjj},
  pages     = {1-8},
  year      = {2016}}

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