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

该项目致力于确定包括孟加拉英语、印度英语、马尔代夫英语、尼泊尔英语、巴基斯坦英语和斯里兰卡英语在内的南亚英语的短期历时语言变化在多大程度上与该地区的语言中心在经验和社会语言学上相一致。语言震中的概念解释了特定区域内几个变种的语言共性，认为这些共同的语言结构起源于该区域的一个模式变种--它的语言震中--然后渗透到该震中的相邻变种，从而整合和建立这些变种。本研究以南亚英语为研究重点，存在三个研究空白：a)缺乏对南亚英语的多因素实证研究；b)缺乏对世界英语特别是南亚英语的历时研究；c)对语言震中的实证研究不足。将在语料库环境的帮助下为缩小这些研究差距作出相关贡献，语料库环境包括代表六种南亚英语的短期历时报纸文本--以及出于控制目的的美国英语和英国英语。词汇和语法之间的结构界面是后殖民英语发展的中心指标，通过对这些变化进行多因素分析并设计统计模型，包括a)分析性形容词与合成形容词比较，b)强制虚拟语气与应该结构，c)助词位置和d)属性词，我们将研究短期历时语言变化。这些短期的历时结构观察将与南亚英语个体的社会语言学概况相补充-特别关注确定它们的进化地位-以及它们彼此之间的联系，最终为语言震中的概念解释南亚英语短期历时语言发展的程度提供经验和社会语言学上的可靠评估。

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.