Lexical Variation across Time and Contact Ecologies: A Comparative Corpus-Assisted Investigation of Multiword Constructions in Indian English and Australian Aboriginal English

The study analyses verbal multiword constructions (henceforth MWCs) in two typologically different varieties of English, namely Indian English and Aboriginal English, with the aim of investigating the diachronic development of compositional (e.g. chase to) and non-compositional constructions bearing figurative/idiomatic meaning (e.g. father upon) in post-colonial varieties of English (Brinton/Closs Traugott 2005; Rodríguez-Puente 2021). In the investigation, corpus-based and methodological procedures widespread in lexicographical research have been matched to 1) identify ‘divergent’ (or unmatched) lexico-semantic variation with respect to reference lexicographical sources; 2) uncover potential differences and/or shared features in Indian and Aboriginal English MWCs. The research draws on data from two annotated corpora, the Diachronic Corpus of Indian English (1,000,000 tokens) and the Diachronic Corpus of Aboriginal English (948,000 tokens), specifically compiled to represent different dimensions of linguistic variability over a period of about 150 years (1833–2013). The two corpora have been designed on the model of available multi-genre corpora like ICE-IND and ICE-AUS to provide a comparable configuration. As major changes in a language are assumed to come from spoken language, speech-related written genres such as witness depositions (containing direct speech) were included for the analysis (Culpeper/Kyto 2010) and then compared to selected proceedings from the Old Bailey Corpus dating back to the same time span. Other sections of the corpora were selected and compared to similar samples from the BNC and ARCHER corpora. Finally, they were compared to lexicographic sources such as the online version of OED and variety-specific dictionaries. Findings suggest that lexical variation in Indian-specific and Aboriginal-specific occurrences emerged after the year 1938. A possible explanation may be that in their first phases of evolution the two varieties followed a similar path, still linked to the common lexifier, but after that date they underwent a phase of nativisation (Schneider, 2007). Hence, the comparison of data from different time periods suggests that the creation of new combinatory patterns is an overall phenomenon occurring regularly and steadily over time and influenced by specific contact ecologies and ‘cogno-cultural’ factors.