Endogeny versus contact revisited: aspectual busy in South African English  

Oleh:

Mesthrie, Rajend

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 24 no. 3-4 (2002), page 345–358.
Topik: Language change; Internal and contact explanations; South African English; Dutch; Afrikaans
Fulltext: 24_03-04_Mesthrie.pdf (121.97KB)

Isi artikel

‘I’m busy going crazy’- [harassed graduate student of Linguistics, University of Cape Town] In an important paper Lass and Wright [Lass, R., Wright, S., 1986. Endogeny versus contact: Afrikaans influence in South African English. English World Wide 7 (2), 201–223] argued that busy in South African English was, contrary to prevailing scholarly intuitions, not really attributable to Afrikaans influence, except for a lifting of the semantic restriction that the verb being modified refer to work activities. The structure itself, they argued, was an endogenous development, i.e. reliant on already existing options within internal English structure, rather than a feature of language contact. This article aims to test the authors’ conclusions in the light of further data since 1986, and the rise of corpus linguistics. It concludes that Lass and Wright were essentially correct in their views, with two important (related) modifications. The first is whether any appeal to Afrikaans pragmatics is necessary; the second is how South African the construction is in the first place.

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