Abstract
Research on the morpho-syntax of non-native varieties of English has reported a widespread presence of mass noun pluralization such as baggages, equipments and softwares. In this paper we conducted a corpus linguistic study in order to provide empirically substantiated answers to this claim. We examined the purported prevalence of noun countability in World Englishes in a 1.9 billion-token mega-corpus of global varieties of English. In a comparison of native and non-native varieties of English, first we algorithmically isolated nouns that are more frequently pluralized in non-native varieties. The results indicate a continuum of non-native English countability, along which mass nouns occupy the most extreme tail of inflated occurrences of noun pluralization. In an exploratory analysis, we then examined the similarity in noun countability behaviour across non-native varieties of English. This analysis revealed that geographically proximate countries in which non-native varieties of English are spoken are most similar in the extent to which they pluralize nouns. We argue that noun-countability is a phenomenon best viewed as a gradient that is also regionally dependent.
Funding statement: Funding: This work was supported by the Ontario Trillium Award and a Graduate fellowship awarded by the Lewis & Ruth Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship to the first author. The second author’s contribution was supported in part by the SSHRC Insight Development grant 430-2012-0488, the NSERC Discovery grant 402395–2012, the Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Research Fund, and the NIH R01 HD 073288 (PI Julie A. Van Dyke).
Acknowledgment
Thanks are due to Paweł Mandera for contributions to computational analysis in initial stages of this project. Thanks are also due to Christopher Hall, Anna Moro and Ivona Ku
Appendix A
As stated in Statistical analyses, the main advantage of the LORIDP measure is that it shrinks the frequency of the words under comparison to a prior frequency in a large background corpus. This enables the researcher to detect differences between words that are very frequent. In order to verify that LORIDP does indeed correct for high-frequency items and also to support our implementation of the chosen measure, we compared the LORIDP measure to two competing measures that have also been used to discover the overpresentation of a word in one corpus as compared to another. For the set of 6,227 nouns that we identified in the data collection procedure, we computed the Damerau (1993) ratio of relative frequencies. This measure estimates the difference between the frequency of the plural form of noun w in the Outer Circle (i), and Inner Circle (j). The relative frequency ratio r is computed as,
where
We also computed a simple difference coefficient used by Johansson and Hofland (1982) and Leech and Fallon (1992), which is computed as,
To test whether LORIDP affords an advantage over other difference co-efficient measures, we separately correlated total word frequency of each word in our data set with each difference coefficient of the over- or underrepresentation of the plural form of the word in Outer Circle Englishes. As the LORIDP measure shrinks word frequency, it is therefore not expected to correlate as strongly with word frequency when compared to the other measures. If the total frequency does not correlate well with LORIDP, then this validates LORIDP as a measure that estimates the difference in pluralization across the Inner and Outer Circle while controlling for the effect of total frequency. As is reported in Table 3, the LORIDP measure yields the weakest correlation with word frequency. We take this observation as support for the adoption of the LORIDP measure in the present investigation.
Spearman’s
| Difference coefficient metric | |
|---|---|
| Damerau’s r | –0.17 |
| Johansson’s difference coefficient | –0.19 |
| Log-odds ratio informative Dirichlet prior (LORIDP) | –0.07 |
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