This dataset contains tabular files recording occurrences of the verb REGRET complemented by a finite or non-finite complement clause (CC) in the GloWbE corpus. The data were drawn from the British, American, South African, Nigerian, Kenyan, and Tanzanian components of the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE). A search for the verb REGRET using the query regret_v yielded 15,559 hits. Because British and American English are highly represented in the corpus, a random sample of 2,000 examples was selected for each of these two varieties, whereas all retrieved examples were retained for the four African varieties. The resulting 6,753 examples were manually examined to identify finite complement clauses introduced by that and nonfinite -ing clauses expressing anterior or simultaneous temporal relations, while excluding irrelevant constructions such as noun phrases, prepositional phrases, bare infinitives, and past participles. Manual post-editing resulted in 1,883 valid examples.
Abstract of publication
This study aims to widen our knowledge of substrate influence and language transfer in World Englishes through the study of the verb complementation system of REGRET in four African postcolonial varieties. An examination of the most widely spoken substrates in each variety does not seem to explain the different tendencies in the distribution of finite and nonfinite complementation patterns across varieties, since English varieties with different complementation systems in their substrate languages, Kenyan English and Nigerian English, for example, show similar distributions in their use of English complementation. Such differences in the distribution seem to be the result of other factors playing an essential role in language contact situations, namely, the tendency towards transparency in second language varieties, the geographical proximity of the English varieties, and the evolution of the varieties measured in terms of the Dynamic Model (Schneider 2007). |
