Variety and Variability

Research into varieties of Englishes around the world has received much attention from scholars. This book offers a new perspective from a cognitive inter and intra lexemic analysis of prepositional variations in Malaysian English and contrasts them with similar prepositions in New Zealand and British English. Based on corpora data from the three varieties, the author provides usage types analysis of the prepositions at, in and on. The analysis exploits cognitive approaches to prepositional polysemy and gives a motivated account of prepositional variations across varieties. The book offers a wealth of corpus based linguistic data and explanation to our understanding of variations in prepositional usage in different varieties of English. The distributional frequencies of various usage types are provided to illustrate the variation.

Autorentext

Imran Ho-Abdullah, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the School of Language Studies and Linguistics, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. He has conducted extensive research in various aspects of English and Malay linguistics using corpus methodology and cognitive linguistics framework.

Inhalt

Contents: Variety and Variability - Descriptions of Prepositional Meaning - A Cognitive Linguistic Framework for Prepositional Usage - The Data Source & Methodology of Usage-type Resolution - Looking at 'at' - Indulging in 'in' - Reflecting on 'on'.