AN INVESTIGATION OF THE COMPLEXITY OF VERB PHRASES IN THE ICE OF FOUR ASIAN COUNTRIES

Abstract

Schneider (2003, 2007), theorizing on the development of new Englishes, has proposed that transplanted Englishes in colonial societies go through several phases in their evolution. Consequently, each phase in their evolution impacts the new English, most especially in terms of linguistic structure. This paper builds on the hypothesis that placement in Schneider's dynamic model affects the linguistic development of new Englishes. More specifically, it tests the hypothesis on the complexity of verb phrases in Hong Kong, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Singapore Englishes with reference to their placement in the dynamic model. The study that was reported in this paper is a corpus-based one and the dataset was the national components of Hong Kong, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Singapore in the International Corpus of English. The focal structure in this corpus-based study is the central and most important constituent in the sentence – the verb phrase. Kortmann and Szmrescanyi (2009), and also Schneider (2003, 2007) and other studies that have invoked his developmental theory, have put forward that Englishes that have reached more advanced developmental stages have more complex linguistic structure. This hypothesis-testing should be able to see how these claims take place in the verb phrases of new Englishes.