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Studies of L1 varieties of English have shown that the modal domain has been reorganised over time. In particular the frequency of the core modal verb must has decreased, while the frequency of the semi-modal verb have to has increased. As an area of ongoing change in L1 varieties, the modal and semi-modal verbs have also attracted the interest of linguists working in the field of L2 varieties. However, the virtual absence of diachronic corpora for most ESL varieties presents a challenge for this area. This paper meets this challenge by exploring the potential of the neglected ICE metadata for bridging the diachronic gap in world Englishes. Information from the ICE-Hong Kong (ICE-HK) metadata is used to construct an apparent-time scenario of the use of must, have to and (have) got to in the spoken section of ICE-HK.

This study employs corpus semantic techniques to examine the semantics of light verbs and light verb constructions (LVCs) in Singapore English, Hong Kong English and British English via their respective components in the International Corpus of English (ICE; Greenbaum 1996). The study investigates onomasiological variation (see Geeraerts et al.1994) by identifying selection preferences in natural use between light verb constructions and their related verb alternatives. In addition, identity evidence is forwarded as a valuable corpus semantic tool, in which instances of naturally occurring language data resemble classic identity tests for polysemy. Via a close reading and manual semantic analysis of thousands of instances of light make, take, give and their semantic alternatives, this study finds remarkable consistency across the three varieties of World Englishes (WEs) in onomasiological preferences, even in extremely nuanced features of LVCs. Onomasiological evidence and identity evidence also suggest the new finding that the three light verbs and their constructions exhibit degrees of lightness, and that these degrees of lightness are extremely consistent across regional varieties.

In British Standard English, number in the verb phrase is exclusively characterized by the use of the -sinflection with the third person singular present tense. World Englishes present a high level of variation as the uninflected third person singular and the inflected third person plural may also occur in these contexts. This paper pursues four objectives: a) to analyse the use of present third person inflections and compare their distribution in different varieties of English; b) to assess the occurrence of forms across speech and writing, text categories and the informants’ age and gender; c) to classify the instances by type of subject (nominal vs. pronominal); and d) to evaluate the impact of proximity agreement, notional agreement and the existence of intervening elements in the choice of the inflection. Our evidence comes from the New Zealand, Indian, Singaporean and Hong Kong components of the International Corpus of English.

This article reflects upon the processes and challenges of building a digital archive of English learning narratives, and engages with broader questions surrounding the collection and presentation of student narratives on an online platform. It also discusses the potential uses of the open-access archive in a global context. The archive hosts over 3000 student narratives collected in diverse leisure, educational, professional and cross-cultural settings in Hong Kong. The diverse learning strategies, approaches and challenges that students share thus provide a holistic record of second language learning practices in various contexts, thereby serving as a useful reference for educators, students and independent learners when they develop their own teaching and learning strategies and approaches.

Research into intonation of non-native varieties of English in the World Englishes paradigm often has a strong focus on typical features at the expense of variation. The present study employs a uni...

In 2015 a new term appeared in public discourse regarding English in Hong Kong: Kongish, which refers to a hybrid form of English and Cantonese used in online communication. This article outlines some of the features of Kongish and assesses its status in Hong Kong, comparing and contrasting it with previous conceptualisations of ‘Hong Kong English’ as a local variety. We argue that the Kongish phenomenon is interesting for two main reasons: first it reveals certain aspects of language use under conditions of late modernity, including computer mediation, the relationship between language and identity, and the presence of a dynamic multilingual language ecology. Second, comparing Kongish and Hong Kong English reveals some of the uses and limitations of the variety concept in studies of language.

During the past five years, the development of various technologies and the maturing of related education industries have never ceased, and the Hong Kong government continually invests into the comprehensive establishment of technology-enhanced education systems, especially those for English education. Here we then meet the point where the efforts of the past five years call for a panoramic view and an in-depth analysis of people's attitudes toward technology-enhanced language learning. This study investigated a total of 56 in-service English teachers' acceptance of technology-enhanced language learning and teaching. These teachers were from 56 different primary schools in Hong Kong. The results presented an overview of the current situation of e-learning in Hong Kong English education, showing insights into the future TELL design and development of related programs.

Owing to the negative view of Hong Kong English (HKE) in popular discourse, few English lecturers in Hong Kong universities directly acknowledge or discuss the variety in a non-linguistic course. This paper illustrates an action research study of how HKE may play a role in an academic writing course of a sub-degree program in Hong Kong. Focusing on 8 representatives from an academic writing course with 100 students, it employed the qualitative experiment method to examine whether students who had possessed basic linguistic knowledge of HKE from an additional tutorial would perceive HKE and academic writing differently from those who had not. Student representatives from each group were invited to a focus group to explore ideas about the two subjects discussed in class. Their conversations suggested that prior knowledge of the syntactic features of HKE might raise students’ awareness of the grammatical differences between the variety and the standard. The analysis also suggested that introducing the linguistic view of HKE to students might render them optimistic about their variety, helping them identify the situations where the variety would be tolerant of and settings where Standard English would be expected. The study suggested that such an intervention might facilitate students’ learning of Standard English for academic purposes and practices of English in actual professional communication. Upon the improvement or advancement, they will position themselves more powerfully in the dichotomy between the standard and non-standard. More formal research on a similar or relevant topic is required to validate the impact of understanding HKE on learning academic writing.

The present study is a follow-up study on Chan (2018a) which examined a new code-switching form in Hong Kong called trilingual code-switching. Previous studies on the code-switching in Hong Kong focused mainly on bilingual code-switching between Cantonese and English, yet Chan's (2018a) ethnolinguistic study suggested that there was a new form of trilingual code-switching among Cantonese, English and Putonghua arisen in Hong Kong because of the increasing contact with mainland China as well as the introduction of Putonghua in the school curriculum. By analyzing the quantitative and qualitative data from sixty university students collected through an online survey, the present study revealed Hongkongers' view on three language uses, including the use of pure code, bilingual code-switching and trilingual code-switching. The result showed that trilingual code-switching exists in Hong Kong with a low acceptance in Hong Kong. Also, the research showed how bilingual code-switching is linked to a Hong Kong identity.

The present study contributes to a well-established line of applied linguistics research in educational contexts on how teachers can make connections between their students' out-of-school knowledge and experiences and what they learn in the classroom by examining a hitherto under-explored context, namely English-medium-instruction (EMI) mathematics classes in Hong Kong (HK). Adopting a translanguaging perspective, the study examines how fluid and dynamic meaning-making practices afford opportunities for teachers to bring the outside into the EMI classroom in order to support the students' learning of new academic knowledge. The data for the present paper is based on a linguistic ethnography project in a HK secondary school where EMI is practised. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is carried out on the classroom interactional data, triangulated with the video-stimulated-recall-interview data analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The findings demonstrate how the teacher constructs a translanguaging space by integrating the students’ everyday life experience in an institutional learning space. It is argued that translanguaging thus helps to transform the EMI classroom into a lived experience, which in turn enhances content learning. The theoretical and pedagogical implications for EMI in other contexts are explored.

Singapore English and Hong Kong English started out as contact varieties and developed into ESL varieties belonging to the Outer Circle (Kachru 1985). Both varieties show a similar contact ecology (Chinese), but differ in their socio-institutional status in the Dynamic Model (Schneider 2003, 2007). By analyzing innovative verb-to-noun conversion in these two varieties, and comparing them to British English, this study shows that despite the obvious similarities in substratum, the usage frequency of conversion in both varieties differs considerably. These findings, similar to — most recently — Deshors (2014) and Gilquin (2015), call into question the established notion of ESL in general and the status of SgE and HKE as ESL varieties in particular. In order to accurately reflect contemporary language use, it is reasonable to conceptualize the notion of ESL as a continuum and to situate HKE and SgE at opposite ends.

The purposes of this study were (a) to identify how ESL learners make phonological changes inEnglish words in a code-mixing context; and (b) to examine ESL learners’ attitudes toward Cantonese-accented English and code-mixing in the classroom setting. Two groups of learners with high proficiency (HP) and mid-level proficiency (MP) were recruited to participate in the research. A specially designed codemixed script, an English translated version, and a list of isolated English words served as the tasks for collecting phonological data. A questionnaire survey was then used to examine participants’ opinions on code-mixing and its effects on pronunciation learning. The results showed that HP and MP learners pronounced numerous words similarly in a Cantonese-accented manner; however, MP learners were less likely to switch back to the correct pronunciation when the context of code-mixing was changed to pure English or when given a list of isolated English words. The survey results found that MP learners tended to be slightly more positive toward Cantonese-accented English and the use of a mixed code in English as a medium of instruction classrooms. Nonetheless, the use of code-mixing was less preferred in English lessons for learners of both groups. More HP learners considered Cantonese-accented English as a symbol of identity as Hongkongers than MP learners.

The present study aims to use a genre-based functional grammar approach to examine how grammar instruction can help improve Hong Kong English learners' story writing performance. Four classes of Secondary 1 (Grade 7) students participated in the study, with one class being the control group. The experimental groups received instructions in a research lesson that highlighted the impact of their choice of process types on story writing, while the control group did not receive any functional grammar instruction. A comparison of the writing performance of the experimental groups in the pre- and post-lesson tests revealed significant improvement, while no progress was found with the control group. The test results were triangulated with the students' class writing and homework, and nine selected students' pre- and post-lesson interview data. The findings revealed students' heightened awareness of the impact of the choice of various processes on writing. The study also found that lower achievers gained substantial benefits from the explicit writing instruction. This study provides insights to ESL/EFL teachers about how to use functional grammar as a pedagogical tool to enhance learners' story writing skills.

The question how substrate features and extralinguistic conditions interact in shaping contact varieties is an ongoing debate in the study of world Englishes. The present study tries to describe substrate influence by identifying an areally marked morphosyntactic feature, subject pronoun deletion, and comparing its occurrence and structural conditioning in two closely related varieties of English in Southeast Asia. Our results show that even in the typologically similar linguistic habitats of Hong Kong and Singapore, the different degrees of nativisation are reflected in the frequency and distribution of null subjects in the two relevant local varieties.

This article reports on a 2015 follow-up to a survey on attitudes towards Hong Kong English which was released to students at a major university in Hong Kong in late September 2014 on the eve of the Umbrella Movement, a largely student-led protest to demand universal suffrage in Hong Kong. While the movement ultimately failed to gain full democracy for Hong Kong, the past year has seen increased political activism among Hong Kong’s youth, and a strengthening of a local identity. In order to investigate whether attitudes towards Hong Kong English have also shifted in the past year, the author re-released the same survey one year after the original study was conducted; this article compares the findings from these two surveys in order to investigate how and why attitudes towards Hong Kong English have shifted and how identity impacts attitudes towards Hong Kong English.

This article provides an argument for Hong Kong English being a tonal language and informs the growing literature on word- and phrase-level prosody interactions. By teasing apart tonal effects that come from intonation and those that come from the word boundary, a clear picture emerges that H tones are assigned in all combinations to HKE di- and trisyllabic words. Tone spreading and blocking across words can also be seen in HKE, but syllables lexically specified for H never give up their tones. Complexity in HKE tone patterns arises when the H tones interact with boundary tones, such as the declarative final L% and the word-initial M.

Hong Kong English is to a certain extent a standardized English variety spoken in a bilingual (English-Cantonese) context. In this article we compare this (native) variety with English as a foreign language spoken by other Cantonese speakers, viz. learners of English in Guangzhou (mainland China). We examine whether the notion of standardization is relevant for intonation in this case and thus whether Hong Kong English is different from Cantonese English in a wider perspective, or whether it is justified to treat Hong Kong English and Cantonese English as the same variety (as far as intonation is concerned). We present a comparison between intonational contours of different sentence types in the two varieties, and show that they are very similar. This shows that, in this respect, a learned foreign-language variety can resemble a native variety to a great extent.

This study gives a corpus-assisted discourse study of the representations of Hong Kong identity with identity labels in a Hong Kong English newspaper (i.e., the South China Morning Post) in the last two decades. It not only identifies the various labels used for the concerned parties, but also examines their varied use in the changing social political context and the ideologies behind the choice of some prominent identity labels. The finding suggests that the newspaper prefers to choose labels that foreground the local identity of Hong Kong rather than its national identification. This trend has become particularly evident since 2003 and the constructions of Hong Kong identity have become increasingly negative in the last few years.

Tag questions in standard British English (BrE) follow a standard pattern consisting of an operator and a subject. This operator generally coincides with the preceding statement while the auxiliary “do” is the choice when the operator is absent. More importantly, a negative tag is generally attached to a positive statement and vice versa (i.e. you know her, don’t you?) (Quirk et al. 1985: 810).The Asian varieties of English are an exception insofar as apparently no standard rule is observed. The present paper investigates the use and distribution of regular and irregular tag questions in Indian English and Hong Kong English with the following objectives: a) to analyze the distribution of the construction of regular and irregular tag questions across these varieties; b) to assess their frequency across speech and writing, text types included; and c) to evaluate the sociolinguistic variation, if any. For the purpose, the Indian and Hong Kong components of the International Corpus of English (ICE-Ind and ICE-HK) will be used as sources of analysis.

Wong questions the prevalent quest for a native-like English accent in Hong Kong and its necessity through presenting the findings from an experiment. This involves training the perception and production of two English vowel contrasts by Cantonese learners of English through different training paradigms including the High Variability Phonetic Training, explicit articulation training, and a combination of both. Converging with prior reports on the efficacy of the training paradigms, the present results reveal differential training effectiveness on different sounds and a ceiling effect observed among participants. The finding that perception precedes production also challenges the predominant focus on production in L2 speech learning in Hong Kong. Taken together, this chapter highlights the importance to reconsider language proficiency in terms of intelligibility and comprehensibility rather than nativeness.

To explore whether Hong Kong English (HKE) is considered by Hongkongers as an acceptable model of English pronunciation, this paper investigates the attitudes of the university students in Hong Kong toward the phonological patterns in HKE. The results show that, though the standard English forms are still generally their first option, the students do attitudinally accept certain features in HKE. Such acceptability of a local L2 variety requires one to reconceptualize the paradigm in second-language research. That is, besides a learner’s native language and the “standard” target variety, researchers should also take into account the local L2 variety which prevails in a learner’s learning environment, as it provides input and is often linked with the learner’s identity. This may sound trivial, yet it is important.

Using a framework based on the notion of norms, Poon argues that Hong Kong English features that are specific to the online context should be regarded as a linguistic variety. Given that this form of English is not only recognized by its users as distinctive from other forms of Hong Kong English(es) but also seen as a marker of the Hong Kong identity, Poon contends that, from a social-functional point of view, Hong Kong English in computer-mediated communication is a variety. The norm framework, which systematically surveys the social functions of a linguistic form from an emic point of view, can also be used to help identify other linguistic varieties.

This multifactorial corpus-based study focuses on verb-complementation constructions (Marcus started to draw a picture vs. Marcus started drawing a picture) and contrasts 3,119 occurrences of gerundial and to-infinitival constructions across native and non-native (ESL) English varieties. Using logistic regression modeling, I analyze how grammatical contexts constrain the syntactic choices of American and Hong Kong English speakers. The regression model reveals a level of complexity in the uses of gerundial/to-infinitival complements that had so far remained unnoticed. Specifically, speakers make syntactic decisions based on comprehensive grammatical contexts rather than single isolated semantic parameters (as previously reported). Further, for the two types of speakers different grammatical features play an influential role in the association of a given predicate with a particular complement type. This suggests that the two speaker populations do not share the same abstract knowledge of the semantic and morpho-syntactic constraints associated with each of the investigated type of complementation. Ultimately, this study shows that combining cognitively oriented theoretical frameworks with rigorous empirical corpus approaches helps distinguish what motivates native and ESL speakers’ syntactic choices.

Previous research on /t,d/ deletion, the omission of the final /t/ or /d/ sound in word-final consonant clusters of two or more consonants (e.g. just pronounced as jus), indicates that it is pervasive in many varieties of English, including world Englishes such as Indian English, Singapore English, and Nigerian English. This study examines /t,d/ deletion in Hong Kong English in order to examine whether the finding that it occurs systematically across a wide range of Englishes can be extended to this new English. Conversational data were collected from 36 Hong Kong tertiary students; analysis of the data via both descriptive and inferential statistics found that /t,d/ deletion occurred for all the participants in the study, and was governed by linguistic factors and in particular, grammatical category and following linguistic environment.

The aim of this paper is to conduct a quantitative corpus-based analysis in order to detect how frequently the invariant tag isn't it is used in the English varieties of India, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Philippines. American and British English were added to the study for point of reference. The data were obtained from the International Corpus of English for all other varieties except for spoken American English, for which the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English was used. The results indicate that the use of isn't it as an invariant tag appears almost solely in spoken language and the highest frequencies can be found in Indian English, followed by Singaporean English, Hong Kong English and Philippine English.

There is a widely held belief that Hong Kong as a community is suffering from an ongoing decline in its standard of English. A very cursory search in the Internet directs readers to many articles lamenting the purportedly poor English standard of Hong Kong people. Appeals for Hong Kongers to improve their English are easy to find. These often originate out of concerns over the unwelcoming possibility of losing out to their close economic competitors such as Singaporeans and their compatriots from China, owing to the importance of English in international trade and communication. However, through reviewing publicly available data, this article reveals that the critique directed at Hong Kong people’s English standard does not always hold up against scrutiny. This article aims to demythologise the issue and points readers’ attention to the possibility of the emergence of a new standard which helps perform important sociolinguistic functions in Hong Kong society.

Available corpus data show that adverbs with modifying meanings, already, also, and only, occur at the clause-final or sentence-final position more often in ‘Asian Englishes’ (Hong Kong English and Singapore English) than British English and Canadian English. This paper posits a link between the motivation of sentence-final adverbs in Asian English and substrate transfer due to linguistic (both grammatical and pragmatic) structures of influential non-English languages in the regions.

A recent special issue of the Journal of English Linguistics has highlighted the paucity of empirical research into the evolutionary dynamics of Outer Circle varieties of English. This article seeks to narrow this conspicuous research gap by presenting the findings of a corpus-based study of the evolution of the Hong Kong English (HKE) lexicon. The investigation was inspired by Schneider’s innovative theoretical framework, the Dynamic Model, which claims that a uniform process involving a sequence of five phases underlies the emergence of postcolonial Englishes. The study was based on the principle that such phases should emerge from the analysis of a uniform set of diachronic data, which in this case consists of a ninety-one-million-word corpus of Legislative Council proceedings (1858-2012). By tracking the use of HKE words in the corpus, the study is able to identify distinct phases in the evolution of the lexicon and thereby provide evidence of the developmental cycle of HKE as a variety.

The current article builds upon and expands the previous research on attitudes to Hong Kong English (HKE) by speakers of English in Hong Kong via a survey with both closed- and open-ended questions given to 307 tertiary students in Hong Kong. Specifically, the study focuses on attitudes towards the legitimacy of HKE and use of HKE as well as why respondents have these attitudes. The study also probes whether cultural identity (Hong Konger, Hong Kong Chinese, Chinese) as well as self-reported use of HKE impacts attitudes towards HKE. Findings from the current study, and particularly from the open-ended questions, provide important insight into how speakers of English in Hong Kong view and use HKE.

Hong Kong English (HKE) has been the subject of a growing body of research over the last few decades. This article presents an overview of research into HKE from both linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. The first section reviews the linguistic features of HKE at phonological, grammatical and lexical levels as documented in the literature. In the second section of the article, the development of HKE as a ‘new’ variety of English is discussed from a sociolinguistic viewpoint, with a view to addressing the question of in which phase HKE is currently situated according to Schneider's (2007) Dynamic Model of evolution for New Englishes. A review of the literature suggests that HKE displays a number of phonological, grammatical and lexical features which makes HKE distinguishable from other varieties of English, with the majority of these features attributable to the influence of Cantonese, the first language of the majority of HKE speakers. With reference to Schneider's model, the article suggests that HKE can be situated in phase 3 and is considered an ‘emergent’ variety with its norms still in the process of developing. While there are signs of increasing awareness of HKE as a distinct variety in the local community, ambivalent attitudes towards the acceptability of HKE as the linguistic norm still exist. It remains to be seen whether HKE will eventually reach phase 4 and become an autonomous variety of English in the near future. This review ends by suggesting several further research directions with respect to the study of HKE.

The publication of the first dictionary of Hong Kong English (HKE) marks a major milestone in the legitimisation of HKE as an autonomous variety of English. This article examines the emergence and current prevalence of the vocabulary of HKE using five recently compiled corpora of English in Hong Kong. The diachronic perspective is provided by a 91-million-word corpus of Legislative Council proceedings (1858–2012) and a collection of 1379 letters published in the city’s leading English-language newspapers (1842–2010). The synchronic perspective is derived from a three-million-word corpus of lifestyle-magazine articles (2005–2012), a database containing 2820 letters published in the South China Morning Post in 2012 and the well-known Corpus of Global Web-based English. These corpora are used to assess the representativeness of the HKE lexicon compiled by the authors of the dictionary, to identify the principal processes of word-formation and to determine phases in the evolution of the HKE vocabulary.

Intelligibility, usually defined as the ability of the listener to recognize words and utterances, is an important consideration for international communication in English. Most research studies have focused on international intelligibility, involving speakers from different language backgrounds. However, there have been few studies of intranational intelligibility, and little is known about how well speakers from ‘the same’ language background understand one another. This study investigated the relationship between accent features and intranational intelligibility by providing 91 listeners in Hong Kong with a range of speech samples taken from Hong Kong media broadcasts in English. These samples contained different combinations of accent features, reflecting different kinds of Hong Kong English accents. Listeners were required to produce orthographic transcripts of the speech samples. Transcript analysis produced a list of words that were frequently mistranscribed, and identification of the accent features involved showed that consonantal modifications were often associated with intelligibility problems. The findings suggest that certain L1-related accent features are capable of reducing intranational intelligibility, as are other accent features and speech processes used by both L1 and L2 English speakers. The study has implications for pronunciation pedagogy, and for those involved with intranational and international communication in English.

Wong offers a fascinating linguistic analysis of blogs in Hong Kong English (HKE), drawing on insights taken from the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE). Using an online corpus analysis interface, Wmatrix, Wong provides a reliable account of parts-of-speech categories and semantic domains that are statistically significant in the online blog postings retrieved from the Hong Kong segment of GloWbE, highlighting the linguistic variation of the HKE blog variety of digital discourse that has not been explored before.

Looking at data taken from the ICE-HK corpus, Wong focusses on the use of expressions of gratitude such as thanks a lot and thank you very much in Hong Kong English. She suggests that Hong Kong speakers of English do not employ a wide variety of thanking strategies and their expressions of gratitude are usually brief, with thanks and thank you being the most commonly used forms. More often than not, these expressions are used as a closing signal and as a complete turn. Repetitive gratitude formulae and appreciation of the interlocutors in conversations are exceedingly rare, hinting at the possibility of substrate influence that Chinese people in general are being too reserved to express their gratitude openly and explicitly.

Focussing on the code-mixing phenomenon in Hong Kong English, Wong offers a detailed literature review on the ways in which English elements are being mixed into Cantonese and thus she argues that there is far less scholarship on code-mixing of indigenous Cantonese words into English. She also draws attention to the crucial argument that this kind of unexplored code-mixing pattern could be related to ethnic solidarity and identity. Having examined the ICE-HK corpus, she finds out that Cantonese colloquial formulaic sequences and cultural expressions occur prominently in both spoken and written texts, suggesting that code-mixing could be a solidarity marker. The chapter also explores other motivations for code-mixing such as the absence of a semantic match between Cantonese proper nouns and their English translations.

An OBJECT CLAUSE, also sporadically referred to as a COMMENT CLAUSE (Warner 1982: 169; Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 951), is that kind of clause functioning as the direct object of the matrix verb. In English, the most common type of object clause is introduced by the complementizer that, hence its traditional label that-clause (Quirk et al. 1985: 1049). Regarding its different usages when occurring in post-predicate position, these constructions are employed to report the speech (i.e. He said that nine indictments have been returned publicly in such investigations), thoughts (i.e. I think Stuart’s gone a bit mad) or attitudes (i.e. I was quite confident that it would stay in very well), among others (Biber et al. 1999: 660-661). As observed, the complementizer that can either be retained or omitted with no meaning alteration and Biber et al. (1999: 681-682) enumerated a series of discourse factors favouring that omission (the presence of co-referential subjects in the main clause and the that-clause, among others) and favouring that retention (the use of coordinated that-clauses, among others). Even though the topic has been extensively researched in British and American English (Biber 1999) and the history of English (Fanego 1990a, 1990b; Suárez-Gómez 2000; Calle- Martín and Romero-Barranco 2014), the academia is still in want of such studies in other varieties of contemporary English. This considered, the present paper will analyze that-clauses in Indian English, Hong Kong English and New Zealand English with the following objectives: 1) to analyze the distribution of that/zero in the mentioned varieties of English; 2) to assess the phenomenon in terms of register and the informants’ age and gender; 3) to classify the instances regarding the verb taking the that-clause (i.e. mental verbs, speech act verbs and other communication verbs); and 4) to evaluate the contribution of some factors favouring the omission and the retention of complementizer that in these environments. The source of evidence comes from the New Zealand, Indian and Hong Kong components of the International Corpus of English. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech.

Hong Kong English (HKE) is a contact variety between two languages that have very distinct syllable structure: Cantonese with a simple structure allowing only three segments and English where syllables can be quite large. Unraveling the structure of the HKE syllable is however quite difficult because evidence is scarce. We do not have a sufficiently large corpus of HKE poetry and rhyme, neither has HKE been known to have language games (ludling) that involve syllable manipulation. In particular, ludlings are the phonological equivalent of a cloud chamber where the syllables may be smashed and their components observed, and hence it is a good probe into HKE syllable structure. In this study, speakers are taught a form of ludling involving backwards manipulation by encoding polysyllabic Cantonese words in reverse order of the syllables, hence Hong Kong is encoded as Kong Hong. These speakers are then invited to encode English words (both mono- and polysyllabic). This study reports a number of interesting findings on the basis of the range of possible backwards manipulations: (i) HKE allows diphthongs as the nucleus of a syllable; (ii) the HKE coda prefers plosives or nasals; (iii) the HKE onset allows clusters but fricatives tend to be treated as syllabic; and (iv) HKE allows syllabic obstruent segments.

This chapter focuses on Cantonese-L1 Hongkongers’ main difficulties in the process of learning English for Academic Purposes (EAP) or Standard English. As the British Received Pronunciation (RP) is widely used in teaching materials in Hong Kong schools, pronunciation difficulties at both the segmental and suprasegmental levels will be explained and illustrated with reference to phonological features in RP and Cantonese. Lexico-grammatical anomalies commonly found among Cantonese-L1 EFL learners, at elementary and intermediate levels, will be exemplified with the help of 12 salient corpus-based learner English structures. In addition, problems arising from the transference of the Chinese-specific ‘response to negative question’ pattern into English will also be discussed.