Non-standard or new standards or errors?
The use of inflectional marking for present and past tenses in English as an Asian lingua franca
Using data of speakers whose first language is a variety of Malay, a language that does not mark for tense, this article will investigate the hypothesis that speakers of second language (L2) varieties of English whose first languages (L1s) do not mark for tense, will use tense marking less frequently than those speakers of L2 varieties of English whose L2s do mark for tense. The article will also review other possible motivations for the presence of non-standard forms in the English, bearing in mind Thomason’s caution “that multiple causes are responsible for a particular change” (2010: 31). It is hoped that the study will contribute to our knowledge of contact-induced change in English worldwide (Schneider 2007, 2012).
References (31)
Ansaldo, U. 2010. Contact and Asian varieties of English. In R. Hickey (ed.), 498–517.
Asante, M.Y. 2012. Variation in subject-verb concord in Ghanaian English. World Englishes 31(2): 208–225.
Bamgbose, A. 1998. Torn between the norms and innovations in World Englishes. World Englishes 17(1): 1–14.
Bao, Z. 2005. The aspectual system of Singapore English and the systemic substratist explanation. Journal of Linguistics 41(2): 237–267.
Bickerton, D. 1981. Roots of Language. Ann Arbor MI: Karoma.
Breiteneder, A. 2005. The naturalness of English as a European lingua franca: The case of the “third person -s”. Vienna: Vienna English Working Papers 14(2): 3–26.
Britain, D. 2010. Grammatical variation in the contemporary spoken English of England. In A. Kirkpatrick (ed.), 37–58.
Chambers, J. 2004. Dynamic typology and vernacular universals. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, P. Trudgill & N. Schilling-Estes (eds), 127–145. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cukor-Avila, P. 2003. The complex grammatical history of African-American and white vernaculars in the South. In English in the Southern United States, S.J. Nagle & S.L. Sanders (eds), 82–105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Green, L.J. 2002. African American English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, C.J., Schmidtke, D. & Vickers, J. 2013. Countability in world Englishes. World Englishes 32(1): 1–22.
Hickey, R. (ed.). 2010. The Handbook of Language Contact. London: Routledge.
Kirkpatrick, A. 2010. English as a Lingua Franca in ASEAN: A Multilingual Model. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Kirkpatrick, A. & McLellan, J. 2012. World Englishes, English as a lingua franca and discourse analysis. In The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, M. Handford & J.P. Gee (eds), 654–669. London: Routledge.
Kirkpatrick, A. (ed.). 2010. The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes. London: Routledge.
Kortmann, B. 2010. Variation across Englishes: Syntax. In A. Kirkpatrick (ed.), 400–424.
Kortmann, B. & Szmrecsanyi, B. 2004. Global synopsis – morphological and syntactic variation in English. In A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol. 2: Morphology and Syntax. A Multimedia Reference Tool, B. Kortmann, K. Burridge, R. Meshtrie, E. Schneider & C. Upton (eds), 1122–1182. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Mufwene, S. 2008. Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change. London: Continuum.
Platt, J. 1991. Social and linguistic constraints on variation in the use of two grammatical variables in Singapore English. In English around the World: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, J. Cheshire (ed.), 376–387. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sand, A. 2004. Shared morpho-syntactic features in contact varieties of English. World Englishes 23(2): 281–298.
Schneider, E.W. 2007. Postcolonial Englishes: Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schneider, E.W. 2012. Contact-induced change in English worldwide. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, T. Nevalainen & E.C. Traugott (eds), 572–581. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seidlhofer, B. 2011. Understanding English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thomason, S. 2010. Contact explanations in linguistics. In Handbook of Language Contact, R. Hickey (ed.), 31–47. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Van Rooy, B. 2013. Corpus linguistic work on Black South African English. English Today 29(1): 10–15.
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Hackert, Stephanie, Catherine Laliberté, Robert Mailhammer, Diana Wengler & Ronia Zeidan
2025.
Past Marking in Australian Aboriginal English on Croker Island: Local Versus Cross-Variety Patterns and Principles.
Journal of English Linguistics
Ji, Ke
2016.
The linguistic features of ELF by Chinese users in China–ASEAN communication contexts
.
Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 5:2
► pp. 273 ff.
Patkin, John
2016.
Heuristic theory in corpus compilation
.
Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 5:2
► pp. 333 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.