Epicentres in World Englishes: empirical diachronic studies of present-day South Asian Englishes

该项目致力于确定在何种程度上短期历时语言变化在英语南亚包括孟加拉国，印度，马尔代夫，尼泊尔，巴基斯坦和斯里兰卡英语是经验和社会语言学的调和与该地区的语言震中。语言震中的概念解释了一个特定地区的几个变体的语言共性，它表明这些共有的语言结构起源于该地区的一个模式变体--它的语言震中--然后渗透到震中的邻近变体中，这些变体整合并建立了它们。本文以南亚英语为研究对象，主要有三个方面的研究空白：（1）缺乏对南亚英语的多因素实证研究;（B）缺乏对世界英语和南亚英语的历时研究;（3）缺乏对语言中心的实证研究。关闭这些研究差距的相关贡献将设计与语料库环境的帮助下，包括短期历时报纸文本代表六个南亚英语-以及美国和英国英语的控制目的。词汇和语法之间的结构界面是后殖民英语发展的一个中心指标，通过对这些变化进行多因素分析和设计统计模型，将研究词汇和语法之间的短期历时语言变化，这些变化包括a）分析与综合形容词比较，B）强制虚拟语气与should结构，c）粒子放置和d）属格。这些短期的历时结构观察将补充社会语言学个人南亚英语的概况-特别注重确定其进化状态-和他们之间的联系，最终提供一个经验和社会语言学可靠的评估在何种程度上的语言震中的概念解释短期的历时语言发展南亚英语。

This project dedicates itself to determining the extent to which short-term diachronic linguistic change in Anglophone South Asia comprising Bangladeshi, Indian, Maldivian, Nepali, Pakistani and Sri Lankan English is empirically and sociolinguistically reconcilable with a linguistic epicentre of the region. The concept of a linguistic epicentre accounts for linguistic commonalities of several varieties in a given region by suggesting that these shared linguistic structures originate in a model variety of the region – its linguistic epicentre – and subsequently permeate to neighbour varieties of the epicentre, which integrate and establish them. With a focus on South Asian Englishes, three research gaps motivate this project: a) the lack of multifactorial empirical research into South Asian Englishes, b) the lack of diachronic studies in World Englishes in general and South Asian Englishes in particular and c) the insufficient empirical research into linguistic epicentres. Relevant contributions to the closing of these research gaps will be devised with the help of a corpus environment consisting of short-term diachronic newspaper texts representing the six South Asian Englishes – as well as American and British English for control purposes. Short-term diachronic linguistic change will be studied at the structural interface between lexis and grammar, which is a central indicator for the development of postcolonial Englishes, by conducting multifactorial analyses of and devising statistical models for the alternations covering a) analytic vs. synthetic adjective comparison, b) mandative subjunctive vs. should construction, c) particle placement and d) genitives. These short-term diachronic structural observations will be complemented with sociolinguistic profiles of the individual South Asian Englishes – with a particular focus on determining their evolutionary status – and their connections with one another to ultimately offer an empirically and sociolinguistically reliable evaluation of the extent to which the notion of a linguistic epicentre explains short-term diachronic linguistic developments in South Asian Englishes.