Ditransitive Verbs in Indian English and British English: A Corpus-linguistic Study.

Abstract

Verb complementation has long been neglected as an area in which second-language varieties of English deviate from native Englishes. The present paper focuses on Indian English as the largest institutionalised second-language variety of English and investigates differences between Indian English and British English at the level of ditransitive verbs and ditransitive verb complementation. By using various corpora, including large databases obtained from the World Wide Web, we show (1) that ditransitive verbs like GIVE are associated to different extents with individual complementation patterns in present-day Indian and British English, (2) that the range of verbs used in the basic ditransitive pattern (with two object noun phrases) is different between present-day Indian and British English, and (3) that the new ditransitives in Indian English do not represent cases of superstrate retention but rather genuinely innovative forms that Indian English users create on grounds of analogy. From a theoretical perspective, we argue that the concept of verb-complementational profile is a useful framework for comparative studies of varieties of English. 1