Noun Phrase Complexity in Pakistani English: Focus On Syntactic Function and Np Pattern
Noun Phrase Complexity in Pakistani English
Keywords:
Pakistani English, Corpus-based, Noun Phrase Complexity, Nativisation Structural simplification, EditorialAbstract
Taking a more corpus-based method to examine NPs in newspaper editorials, the current research examined the complexity of the NP in Pakistani English, referred to five parameters proposed by Brato (2020): NP patterns, length of premodification, length of postmodification, complexity of premodification, and complexity of postmodification). The mixed-method research strategy that combines quantitative frequency counts that are corpus-based with qualitative comparative analysis was adopted. The study considered four possible predictors (syntactic function, length, structural complexity of the premodifier, and structural complexity of the postmodifier) using conditional inference trees. Moreover, within the variationist theoretical framework, the integrated model by Brato (2020) was used as an analysis tool in this study the frequency counts of the variants in the corpus were conducted. The analysis of the data showed that syntactic function is a significant predictor of NP complexity in the Pakistani English and the patterns of NPs also have a correlation with syntactic function. The results also show that Pakistani English has structural simplification and nativisation.
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