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Modeling World Englishes: Assessing the interplay of emancipation and globalization of ESL varieties
Edited by Sandra C. Deshors
[Varieties of English Around the World G61] 2018
► pp. 217–244

It is time that this (should) be studied across a broader range of Englishes

A global trip around mandative subjunctives

| Zurich University

In subordinate clauses after mandatives such as recommend or require, English speakers can choose between a subjunctive or a modal construction. Studies of this alternation in second-language varieties of English (ESL) are scarce. Previous research looked at the distribution of subjunctives across varieties, speech and writing, their co-occurrence with passive voice and individual triggers. However, these factors have not been studied as predictor variables for the subjunctive: modal alternation. This study uses corpus data from the International Corpus of English and the Global Web-based English corpus to model the relative strength of external predictor variables for the mandative alternation across a broad range of Englishes. The findings do not lend themselves to straightforward interpretation within an individual model of World Englishes.

Keywords: mandative sentences, subjunctive: modal alternation, probabilistic grammar approach
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research: Recent and ongoing change in World Englishes
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Corpus data of World Englishes
    • 3.2Definition of the variable context
    • 3.3Predictor variables
    • 3.4Data retrieval
      • 3.4.1Core study
      • 3.4.2Follow-up study
  • 4.Results: Contextual and/or linguistic factors?
    • 4.1Distribution of mandative subjunctives in ICE by predictor variable
    • 4.2Statistical analysis: Variable importance
    • 4.3Gauging the effect of the trigger
  • 5.Discussion: Mandative subjunctives and models of World Englishes
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • Corpus
  • References
Published online: 13 September 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g61.09hun
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