Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis investigates how the use of three futurates (will, shall and BE going to) is constrained in six varieties of World English (American, British, Canadian, Indian, Jamaican, and Philippine...Show moreThis thesis investigates how the use of three futurates (will, shall and BE going to) is constrained in six varieties of World English (American, British, Canadian, Indian, Jamaican, and Philippine). Using a Construction Grammar approach, it is assumed that the futurates are separate constructions, all part of a single network (Bergs 2010). They can then be analysed in terms of form (i.e. their morphosyntactic environment), function (i.e. their semantic and pragmatic meaning) and context (i.e. the types of texts they appear in). The six varieties of World English under investigation here present a cross-section of World Englishes as they are conceptualized by Strang (1970), Quirk et al. (1972), Kachru (1985) and Schneider (2007). The data used in this thesis comes from the ICE-corpora, a collection of corpora with the same methodology and which are thus optimally comparable. The impact of various variables related to form and function was explored using conditional trees and conditional random forests. The results show that the futurates under investigation show a high degree of overlap regarding the environments in which they can be found. The functional variables included do not play a significant role. On the other hand, some variables associated with the futurates’ form do – especially the person and animacy of the subject. Additionally, the futurates are conditioned differently in different varieties of English. However, no clear categorization in terms of the frameworks designed to capture World Englishes (e.g. Kachru’s (1985) Concentric Circles or Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model) can be uncovered. This first look at how the use of the futurates is conditioned in six varieties of World English shows that it is an exciting topic for further investigation, as there are interesting differences between the varieties under investigation.Show less