Verb complementation patterns in Indian Standard English1

Eugenia Olavarría de Ersson and Philip ShawEnglish Department, University of Stockholm

Abstract.

Where English has two or more alternative complementation

patterns for the same verb, their relative frequencies might

vary among national varieties. This article investigates the

relative frequencies of various complementation patterns among

nine verbs whose complementation may differ between British and

Indian English: provide, furnish, supply, entrust and present; pelt,

shower, pepper, bombard. A method was devised to use on-line Indian

and British newspaper archives as a source of more examples

than could be obtained from corpora. The results showed

consistent differences between varieties. The construction NP1-

V-NP3-NP2 (he provided them money), though not common, was more

likely to occur in Indian than in British newspaper English.

The construction NP1-V-NP3-with-NP2 (he provided them with money)

was considerably more common for most verbs in British English

than in Indian, relative to the alternative NP1-V-NP2-to/for/at-

NP2 (he provided money to them), illustrating the systematic nature

of structural nativisation.

1. Introduction

Conventional definitions of Standard English see it as a fairly

homogeneous dialect with national variations in pronunciation,

lexis, and to a small extent syntax (Quirk et al 1985: 19). In

the absence of codification of most varieties it is generally

argued that the usage considered acceptable by the ‘educated’

speakers in a territory is the Standard English of that

territory. Since part of the definition of ‘educated’ in many

countries is ‘having an adequate command of local Standard

English’ the definition is partly circular, but it is the best

we have for the moment, as long as we want to stick to a notion

of Standard English. For these standards to have full validity,

many would argue, they should be codified, and this is a

process which has only just begun for most of them. Description

is the first stage, and descriptions of lexical and syntactic

characteristics are starting to be available for many

varieties, including the subject of this paper, Indian Standard

English (StIndE).

During the last ten years, research in syntactic variation in

StIndE has focused primarily on tense, aspect and modality.

However, complementation appears to be an equally important

element in determining the semantics of a verb as tense, aspect

and modality are, since complementation of a verb ”completes

the specification of a meaning relationship which the [verb]

implies” (Quirk et al., 1985: 1150). Verb complementation is an

all-pervading structural feature of language and thus likely to

be more significant in giving a variety its character than, for

example, lexis. Furthermore it is of considerable theoretical

interest both in the generative tradition (cf Saleemi 1993) and

in construction grammar (Croft 1998). A number of studies of

verb complement systems have been carried out and even though

they have mainly been small-scale or inconclusive, they have

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produced results which suggest that further work would be

useful.

A landmark description of the more distinctive syntactic,

lexical, stylistic, idiomatic and collocational features

considered representative of IndE is that of Nihalani, Tongue

and Hosali (1979). Included in this handbook are complex

prepositional verbs of frequent use, whose complementation

patterns, according to the authors, are different in Indian and

British English. However, the survey was made without benefit

of a corpus and is therefore inevitably impressionistic,

offering suggestions for investigation rather than established

results.

Some later studies have examined the Kolhapur corpus, a one-

million word corpus designed to be parallel to the American

Brown and British LOB corpora. Leitner (1994), for example,

provides an analysis of the complementation of begin and start in

these three collections. As we would expect, he found no clear

differences between ‘native’ Brown and LOB vis-à-vis ‘non-

native’ Kolhapur, but some variation among the three varieties.

Thus for example start is more frequent than begin in fiction in

LOB, while in Brown and Kolhapur begin predominates. In terms

of complementation, there was considerable variation of the

frequency of different patterns with start. For example, only

one in twenty instances of start in the Kolhapur corpus were

followed by a verb with the to-infinitive, while LOB had 15%

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and Brown had 22%. Leitner applies no statistical tests and we

do not know which of his contrasts are significant.

Leitner produces interesting results by concentrating on two

related verbs in the three corpora. By contrast, Shastri (1996)

gives an account of differences in a wide variety of

complementation patterns between LOB and Kolhapur. He set out

to investigate whether 29 items found to be characteristic of

Pakistani English relative to Standard British English and

American English were also shared by Indian English. The items

under study comprised nouns, adjectives and verbs that require

a complement. Among the verbs, most are prepositional and

exhibit both simple and complex patterns of complementation.

Whereas simple prepositional verbs carry a prepositional object

as their complement, complex prepositional verbs customarily

carry as their complement a direct object followed by a

prepositional object. Shastri’s work shows that some of the

‘South Asian’ structures expected were found, but normally

alongside the forms expected on other Standard varieties. More

interestingly, it shows that in several cases there was

variation between an apparently standard and an apparently non-

standard form in both Indian and British English. Thus in these

cases (as with Leitner above) it was not a matter of an

absolute difference, with one variety reliably having form A

and the other consistently form B, but of relative frequency,

with A more frequent in one variety relative to B than in the

other. Another striking result of this investigation concerns

corpus size and choice of items for investigation. 29 types

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were chosen for investigation, and only five occurred in

Kolhapur at the rate of more than 100 tokens. Eleven occurred

under ten times, and two were entirely absent. Furthermore,

tokens of typically South Asian usages make up a rather small

proportion of the total tokens for each type (usually one or

two per cent). Such usages were found for four of the five

types with over 100 tokens, but only for three of the eleven

with fewer than ten tokens. Given the small proportion of

tokens which exemplify South Asian usages, the absence from the

corpus of some such usages is quite likely to be simply due to

the sample being too small.

The research record suggests that there are likely to be

statistically significant differences in the frequencies of

different complementation patterns between varieties of

English. The Kolhapur corpus is clearly a useful tool, but only

for the most frequent items. We do not know about many

differences, and we do not know whether they are systematic or

randomly lexical. Our investigation aimed at starting to answer

some of these unanswered questions.

2. Aim and Scope

In this paper we aimed to carry out a cross-variety study of

the complementation patterns of a group of verbs which have

related meanings and syntactic usage. The investigation

selected the items to be investigated on a principled basis in

the hope of being able to assess whether any differences

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reflected general features of usage in the varieties, or word-

level differences in lexical specification. It aimed above all

at having large enough samples of the items in question for

statistical judgements of similarity and difference to be

valid. It concentrated exclusively on standard (edited) written

IndE and BrE as found in major Indian and British newspapers,

respectively. It has therefore nothing to say about colloquial

or non-standard usage in either variety.

Since this question could not be answered from the established

corpus available to us, we devised a way of using Internet

resources as a source of linguistic information. It was

therefore also among our aims to find out whether this could be

done effectively.

Our research questions were:

Can newspaper on-line search facilities be used to answer

linguistic questions of the present kind?

Are there differences between a British and an Indian sample in

the frequencies of various complementation patterns of each of

these verbs?

Are the differences idiosyncratic to each verb or do they apply

to coherent sets of items?

We further hoped to be able to suggest reasons for the

differences we found. One possibility would be that frequent

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verbs are so common in our input that there is little scope for

local features to develop, while less frequent ones can develop

idiosyncratically. Another is of course the opposite! Our

fourth question was therefore

Are there differences between frequent and infrequent verbs in

respect of complementation patterns?

Our null hypothesis would be that Indian and British samples

exhibit the same range of complementation patterns and the same

frequencies of occurrences of those patterns. As we explain

below, we have chosen two related sets of related verbs where

we have reason to suspect differences and we want to find out

whether the differences exist and whether they are systematic.

3. Classification of verbs

Our first task was to select the items for examination. Four

verbs mentioned in Nihalani et al (1979) - provide, furnish, supply

and present - exhibit the same complementation patterns (allowing

the constructions “V NP to NP”, “V NP with NP”, and, marginally,

“V NP NP”) and in the relevant senses are semantically related,

having to do with giving something to someone. Simultaneously,

a pilot study of the complementation of pelt (as pelt stones at)

suggested that usage of that particular verb was different in

the two varieties, with pelt stones at characteristic of Indian

English and pelt someone with [tomatoes] more frequent in British

samples. This is an area of potential interest. We therefore

chose to focus on verbs related to those already mentioned, and

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to choose items on a continuum from relatively high frequency

to relatively low frequency in their use.

Nihalani et al’s (1979) four verbs all belong to the same set of

verbs in the classification made by Levin (1993). According to

Levin, who is working from a generative-grammar perspective,

verbs that share similar syntactic behaviour with respect to

the various possible expressions of their arguments and the

special interpretations associated with them share also at

least some aspect of meaning. She groups the verbs provide,

entrust, furnish, supply, credit, issue, leave, serve and trust and present

under the general category of Verbs of Change of Possession,

which have the common feature of expressing their arguments in

the ”NP1 V NP2 to NP3” pattern (1993:140). (This is a subclass

of the category ‘ditransitive complementation’ in the terms of

Quirk et al.1985) Within this general classification, Levin

distinguishes seven main verb group sets, namely Give Verbs,

Contribute Verbs, Verbs of Future Having, Verbs of Providing,

Verbs of Obtaining, Verbs of Exchange and Berry Verbs. The verbs

associated with a given verb group set are close in meaning and

syntactically they express their arguments through the same

complementation pattern(s). The group set labelled Verbs of

Providing is further classified into subsets - Verbs of

Fulfilling and Equip Verbs.

The verbs provide, furnish, supply and present all fall within the

group subset of Verbs of Fulfilling. The common semantics

shared by all these verbs is described by Levin as ”verbs where

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X gives something to Y that Y deserves, needs, or is worthy of”

and as verbs whose meaning specifies something about the actual

type of act of providing rather than about what is provided

(Levin:140-141). Syntactically, these verbs also share common

characteristics. They express their arguments in two patterns:

the ”NPa V NPo to NPg” pattern and the ”NPa V NPg with NPo”

pattern, (where V = verb, NPa = noun phrase expressing agent,

NPg = noun phrase expressing goal/beneficiary and NPo = NP

expressing item transferred /theme). Whereas in the first

pattern what Levin calls the goal argument, that is the

beneficiary, is expressed in the prepositional phrase to NPg,

in the second pattern it is what Levin calls the theme

argument, the item transferred, that is expressed in the

prepositional phrase with NPo. For Quirk et al. (208), NPa V NPo

to NPg is an instance of the verb complementation pattern

”direct object + prepositional object” whereas NPa V NPg with

NPo is an instance of ”indirect object + prepositional object”

(Quirk et al 1985.: 1208).

As regards the argument pattern ”NPa V NPg NPo”, called

”dative alternation” by Levin, which corresponds to Quirk et

al.’s complementation pattern ”indirect object+direct object”,

Levin states that ”judgments differ as to whether some of these

verbs [belonging to the verb subset of Verbs of Fulfilling] can

be found in the dative alternation” and adds that those verbs

that clearly exhibit this pattern - issue and serve - also belong

to the verb group sets of Give verbs and Verbs of Future Having2

(140-141). Quirk et al., on the other hand, classify the verbs

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provide and serve as verbs that can take the ”indirect

object+direct object” complementation pattern, although they

remark that the use of provide in the ”indirect object + direct

object” pattern is a characteristic feature of American English

(1210). Quirk et al. rule out the use of this kind of pattern

for the verb supply but do not comment on the correctness of this

pattern for other verbs in this group (1211).

Levin states that verbs belonging to the subset of Verbs of

Fulfilling do not show any other prepositions than to and with.

It seems, however, that for is used as an alternative

preposition in the pattern ”NPa V NPo to NPg”, in some of the

verbs in this subset. For example, Quirk et al. specify that

supply can alternate between the prepositions to and for in the

”direct object+prepositional object” pattern, but also state

that only for can be used with provide in this pattern (1985:

1210-11).

We decided to examine the four Verbs of Fulfilling mentioned in

Nihalani et al (1979) - provide, furnish, supply and present – and to

add the verb entrust, as being probably rather less frequent but

otherwise belonging to the same set.

The verb pelt is placed by Levin under the general

classification of Verbs of Throwing. The common feature shared

by the verbs belonging to the general classification of Verbs

of Throwing is that they involve ”ballistic motion by imparting

a force” (Levin:147). Within this general classification, Levin

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distinguishes two main verb group sets, namely Throw Verbs and

Pelt Verbs. Throw Verbs, such as throw, toss and kick, among others,

are used to refer to an ”entity that is set in motion and that

moves unaccompanied by the agent of the action” (Levin: 147).

Pelt Verbs describe rather ”the motion of a set of physical

objects [that also move unaccompanied by the agent of action]”

(Levin:148). Quirk et al. classify these verbs under the very

wide heading of prepositional verbs of the type where ”the

lexical verb and the preposition, although normally separated

by the object, form an idiomatic combination” and where the

verb governs the preposition, ”in the sense that the

preposition is selected by reason of the verb, rather than by

independent semantic choice”.

Pelt verbs (pelt, shower , bombard, buffet and stone, according to

Levin) make use of an argument structure ”NPa V NPg with NPo”

that involves three participants, where NPa, the subject, is

the agent of the action, NPg, the direct object, is ”the goal

that the moving objects are set in motion toward” and the

prepositional phrase with NPo expresses the moving objects

(Levin: 148). Quirk et al. add that the prepositional phrase is

optional for some of these prepositional verbs but not for

others (Quirk: 1159). Levin states that verbs belonging to the

set of Pelt Verbs cannot be used with prepositions other than

with, and Quirk et al. implicitly state the same when they speak

of ”the verb GOVERNING the preposition” for this type of

prepositional verbs. However, as noted above, a pilot study

suggested that in Indian English at least NPa pelt NPo at NPg was

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a possibility, and we therefore wanted to confirm this and see

if it was generalisable.

Verbs may belong to two of Levin’s categories even in the same

use. Thus bombard is classified by Levin as belonging not only

to Pelt Verbs following the complementation pattern V NP with NP,

but also to Fill Verbs, such as adorn, impregnate and staff. The

latter group of verbs present, according to Levin, the

alternating patterns NPa V NPg with NPo and NPo V NPg, whereby

the prepositional object that specifies the instrument in the

first construction becomes the subject of the second

construction. This can be illustrated by these examples from

our survey

Hoax messages are bombarding the Internet

The more hyperbolic and portentous statements that bombard you at such times….

The set of moving objects normally found in the prepositional

phrase (he is bombarding the Internet with hoax messages) can become the

subject of the sentence when used with a verb like bombard.

According to OALD the verb shower means ‘to drop a lot of small

things onto somebody’. However, Levin also groups this verb

under the Spray/Load Verbs. The meaning of some of the verbs

within the Spray/Load Verbs group, such as spray, scatter, splash

and sprinkle, relate to covering surfaces with a liquid or a set

of small particles (Levin: 117-119) and in practice it is often

difficult to determine whether the meaning of shower in a given

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sentence refers to dropping a set of small particles or to

covering a surface with small particles since in many cases the

act of dropping has as a consequence the act of covering. All

Spray/Load Verbs take the complementation patterns V NPg with NPo

and V NPo on NPg, which are alternating patterns for this group

of verbs just as V NPg with NPo and V NPo to NPg are alternating

patterns for Verbs of Fulfilling as we saw earlier. Some of the

verbs in the Spray/Load Verbs group, such as spray, splash and

squirt also take the complementation pattern V NPo at NPg. Thus

alternative complementation patterns are also available for

shower.

The group set of Pelt Verbs includes, according to Levin, the

verbs pelt, shower, bombard, buffet and stone. Pilot studies

suggested that we would not be able to find a reasonable number

of sentence samples with the verbs buffet and stone in the

relevant forms. Instead, we opted to examine the verb pepper,

one of whose uses is close in meaning and shares the same

complementation pattern as pelt, shower, and bombard. The verb

pepper only occurs in Levin’s work under Butter Verbs together

with butter, grease and salt, among other verbs (Levin:120) so

that its use in pepper him with questions is not covered. However,

pilot studies suggest that pepper may be classified as

belonging to the Pelt Verbs that follow the complementation

pattern NPa V NPg with NPo. Like bombard it also seems to share

the traits of Fill Verbs, also taking the pattern NPo V NPg as

in the following sentence from our survey:

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Mukesh was on fire as his short-iron shots peppered the flags with almost radar-like

accuracy.

This could be rephrased:

Mukesh was on fire as he peppered the flags with short-iron shots of almost radar-

like accuracy.

Thus we decided to examine five verbs of fulfilling: provide,

entrust, furnish, supply, present, and four pelt verbs: pelt, shower, bombard,

pepper. We suppose that these represent a range of token

frequencies, with provide and supply, for example, markedly more

frequent than bombard and pepper.

4 Material

The Kolhapur Corpus is too small to answer most of our

questions, and in the absence of an Indian National Corpus we

therefore decided to adopt a procedure which gave us large

comparable samples without drawing on a defined corpus.

Our sources of edited written Standard English are the major

Indian and British newspapers that are both available via the

internet and that have a search engine on the web. The Indian

newspapers are the metropolitan dailies The Times of India and The

Indian Express, their circulation figures being 2,144,842 (Times of

India, July 06, 2002 ) and 686,000 (Business World May 15 2000),

respectively. Additionally, samples have been drawn from The

14

Tribune of India, a newspaper established since 1881, which is

widely sold in northern India. As regards British newspapers we

have drawn samples from two established national dailies that

have a search engine in the web, The Independent and The Guardian

Online. To give an idea of the size of the corpus available for

this study, we can say that the search engines of The Indian

Express and The Tribune of India give access to articles published in

these newspapers from 1997 and on. As for The Times of India, its

search engine offers access only to articles published from

2000. For their part, The Independent and The Guardian Online offer

access to articles published since 1999.

A newspaper database of this kind has certain advantages. On

the one hand, newspapers constitute an amalgamation of the

language used in most written material. Since they cater to a

large readership, they are written in a way that is

understandable by large audiences of people, unlike legal

texts, administrative texts and literary texts.

The metropolitan Indian newspapers are undoubtedly in Standard

English. Indian English scholars report that metropolitan

Indian newspapers, unlike regional papers, are marked by few

conspicuous local features, so that regional dailies reflect

more closely the characteristic features of (potentially

nonstandard?) written IndE than metropolitan papers do (Görlach

1997). Thus we can be sure that what we find – if anything –

is indeed standard edited usage.

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Three problems might arise. First, the newspapers’ engines

might search different corpora. All appear to search material

available on-line, in the sense that if one takes a string from

an article turned up by a newspaper search engine, and re-

searches on it using Google, one comes back to the same

article. All also appear to search on the whole of the on-line

newspaper archive. Searching for winner in Times of India produces

articles on show business, sport, local politics, and

international politics from ‘World Buzz’, ‘Miscellaneous’,

‘Football’ ‘Mumbai’ and ‘Editorial’ sections, and equivalent

searches in the Tribune and Express produce Tribune articles from

‘Television’ ‘Sport’, ‘Bollywood’ ‘Main News’, ‘Chandigarh’ and

‘Ludhiana’ and from the Express they produce a political column,

a feature article, an editorial, a national political news

story, and several sports articles. Similar results are found

from the British papers. The corpus sampled from is broad and

inclusive in all cases.

The second problem is that the newspapers’ engines probably

search using different criteria. The Tribune and the Express both

use the Google engine and its complex criteria of ‘relevance’.

The Times of India, Guardian, and Independent appear to use their own

search engines, so they probably use different criteria for

selecting and ordering the articles. However, tests show that

all the engines return a selection of articles which contain

the string of letters searched for, and it is not obvious why

there should be systematic linguistic bias in that selection.

16

Third, one might wonder whether all the material retrieved was

actually the variety intended. However, it all appears with

bylines or sources – so that we know for example that some

material (Goan local news) published in the Times of India

originated with its Goa subsidiary the Panaji Navhind Times. Since

we had painstakingly to examine each article to find the word

we were looking for, we were able to filter the material

according to the sources given. We aimed to examine ‘pure’

Indian and British English. Hence, articles having Reuters, AP

or any other agency of non-Indian origin as their source were

not included in our Indian sample. Similarly, we did not

include sample sentences that were quotations from British or

American speakers or from British or American written reports.

Articles from sources vaguely specified as ”Agencies” were not

included either. The articles that were chosen are either

signed by Indian writers or they have the Press Trust of India

(PTI), the United News of India (UNI) or the specific news

service or subsidiary of the individual Indian newspapers as

their source. By the same token, when collecting material from

British newspapers, we have avoided including quotations from

nonnative speakers of English.

5. Method

We searched for examples of nine verbs, counting only forms

with the following meanings:

Table 1: Meanings of the chosen verbs which were used or

rejected

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In general it was easy to tell which meaning of a verb was

being used, but there were of course marginal cases. As noted

above, the most difficult was determining whether shower

referred to dropping a set of objects, covering a surface, (as

the following sentences in the British samples illustrate: It

showered debris into gardens, … fires showering beaches with ash and … blast

furnace showering workers with molten iron) or giving somebody a lot

of something. This is particularly problematic when shower is

used in a metaphorical sense, as the following sentences in the

Indian samples illustrate: They showered him with blows, ..a doctor

showered some choicest abuses on Sonia Gandhi, …a 60-year old Manibhai

showered expletives on him, and The audience lived up to the dancer's

expectations in showering applause. Be that as it may, we tried to

collect sentence samples where the meaning of shower as dropping

or casting a set of objects is relatively straightforward.

Somewhat arbitrarily, we accepted the above examples as

metaphorically covering someone with small objects.

We found examples of verbs in use by setting the newspaper’s

search engine to find articles containing a particular form.

This gave us a list of articles, each of which had to be

checked for origin, as described above, and then had to be

searched by eye for the target form. Once the form was found,

a further process of elimination was necessary to ensure that

it was indeed a verb, and that the meaning was the relevant

one. Despite the laboriousness of this process, we obtained 200

or more sample sentences for each of eight verbs, 100 or so

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each from the Indian and from the British newspapers, and 130

(65 each) for the ninth.

The verb forms collected for this investigation are verb

phrases in the active voice, finite and non-finite. While

passive verbs probably show the same range of structures, it

seems at least possible that usage is affected by voice and we

did not want to introduce another variable. In order to make

the Indian and British samples as closely comparable as

possible, special care was taken to have the same proportions

of the different verb forms in both samples. That is, our aim

was to collect 25 sentences containing the verb form provide, 25

containing provides, 25 containing provided and 25 containing

providing in both the Indian and British sentence samples. It

was, however, rarely possible to obtain an equal number of

sentences for each verb form3, and instead we kept the same

proportions of forms in the Indian and British samples. For

example, for a verb such as present, in searching for the forms

present and presents one finds a lot of nouns and it is difficult

to find the intended verb forms. We therefore gathered only 11

sentences with present and 8 with presents as against 28 with

presenting and 56 with presented. However we ensured that we had

the same number of each form in both the Indian and British

samples. Consequently our data cannot be used to compare across

verbs, but provide a fair comparison across varieties. Since it

was impracticable to maintain even this principle for shower and

the two samples contained different proportions of the various

19

tenses, this word is less reliably documented than the others.

In practice we collected forms in the proportions in Table 2.

Table 2 Numbers of tokens of the various verbs collected, by

form

In the case of the Indian sample sentences, care was also taken

to gather the same number of sentences with each verb and each

form from the three newspapers. This means that, for every

verb, we have collected 34 sentences from The Indian Express, 33

from The Times of India and 33 from The Tribune of India; and that of

the 56 sample sentences of the verb form presented, 19 have been

retrieved from The Indian Express, 19 from The Tribune of India , and 18

from The Times of India. This has been done in an effort to avoid

system errors and to avoid the risk of recording samples that

might only reflect the style of a handful of Indian

journalists. We took the risk of not proceeding in the same

fashion when retrieving samples from British newspapers,

assuming that we were dealing with large staffs of

journalists4.

As a second step, for each verb, the sentences from both Indian

and British newspapers were classified according to the verb

complementation pattern that they exhibit. The frequency of the

complementation patterns was calculated and the distribution

frequencies obtained from both sources were contrasted. We used

a chi-square goodness-of-fit test to get a clearer indication

of whether the distribution frequencies obtained were

statistically significant. The analysis also involves, when

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applicable, comparing the patterns found in the samples from

Indian sources to those found in Nihalani et al.’s handbook.

Our theoretical framework is given by Levin (1993) and Quirk et

al.(1985). These works are viewed as providing a framework to

describe how verbs are used by most people in the English

speaking community. Table 3 gives examples of the types of

sentence we collected.

Table 3: Illustrative examples of some frequent complementation

patterns

6. Results

6.1. Verbs of fulfilling

Table 4 Verbs of fulfilling: numbers of instances of various

patterns found, by verb and variety

Table 4 shows the results of our count for the five verbs of

fulfilling. There are no meaningful absolute differences

between the samples. That is, there are no obvious cases where

a construction is well represented in one sample and absent

from the other. However, the relative distributions in the

Indian and British samples were significantly4 different for

four out of the five verbs: provide, furnish, supply, and present. The

table shows that for each of these verbs (that is all except

entrust) the main locus of difference was a higher proportion of

constructions with with in the British sample and a higher

proportion with to (and sometimes for) in the Indian one. Another

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consistent, though small, difference is the higher proportion

of V NP NP constructions in the Indian sample.

There are naturally differences in the frequency of each

pattern that are idiosyncratic to each verb, but the above are

the only differences across samples that are meaningful.

Table 4 shows that a very frequent pattern in both IndE and BrE

for provide, furnish, supply, and present is the monotransitive pattern

V NPo. The monotransitive pattern can be used even though the

semantics of the verbs requires verb complementation with two

objects because the prepositional object specifying the goal

argument or the recipient may be inferred from the context of

the sentence. Quirk et al. note, in this regard, that for verbs

that follow the pattern ”direct object+prepositional object”,

the prepositional object is optional in some cases but not in

others” (Quirk et al 1985: 1159). The pattern V NP for NP is

available mainly for provide and the two samples used it equally

frequently. In the case of furnish, a proportion of the

difference between the samples is contributed by difference in

the proportions of cases in which one argument is ellipted,

which is probably a discourse feature and not relevant here.

The verb entrust patterns differently from the others. First,

there is no significant difference in usage between the two

samples. Second, V NP (+understood goal or recipient) hardly

occurs. Third, there are several occurrences of complementation

patterns with clausal elements: entrust NP to-inf clause (Indian

22

sample 4 cases, British 5) and entrust NP with -ing clause (Indian

sample 3 cases, British 6).

6.2. Pelt verbs

Our results showed that complementation patterns for pelt and

shower are different from those for bombard and pepper and it is

therefore convenient to report them in separate tables.

Table 5: Pelt and shower: instances of various patterns found,

by verb and variety

Table 5 shows no absolute differences, but significant

differences in the frequency distribution of the Indian and

British samples. In the British sample the pattern with with

predominates, overwhelmingly for pelt, very considerably for

shower. This means that the goal is predominantly in the direct

object slot and the moving object is the complement of the

preposition. In fact overall 97 of the hundred cases of pelt in

the British sample have the goal as direct object, and 73 of

the cases of shower. In the Indian sample less than a fifth of

cases have with, and a substantial majority of the cases of

both verbs have the moving object in the direct-object slot and

the goal as complement of either at or on. Preference for at or on

appears to be the same in both samples – that is the few

British uses are of at for pelt and on for shower, and the Indian

uses are predominantly of the same prepositions with the same

verbs

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A striking feature of the data for pelt, which has no parallel

elsewhere in our data, is that in the Indian English data 79%

of occurrences of pelt have stones as NPo, in expressions like

pelt stones at someone. Pelt seems to predict or collocate with stones

as reliably as rancid collocates with butter.

We noted above that shower presented difficulties in

distinguishing relevant uses. Some cases may have been wrongly

included here, but in roughly 40 out of the 48 sentences in the

Indian samples that show either the pattern V NPo on NPg or the

pattern V on NPg NPo (under ‘others’) the meaning of casting a

set of objects seems quite straightforward, so the figures seem

reasonably secure.

Table 6 Bombard and pepper: instances of various patterns found, by verb and variety

Table 6 shows that the patterns for bombard in the two samples

are not significantly different. While there is a statistically

significant difference between the two for pepper, it is due to

different proportions of specification of the arguments, a

phenomenon we have seen above with furnish. A tendency to specify

or not specify a role is more likely to be a matter of

discourse patterns than pure complementation, and beyond the

scope of this paper. The absence of the difference we have seen

in other tables is presumably a consequence of neither variety

having any construction for either bombard or pepper in which

both goal and moving object are specified other than (NPa) V

NPg with NPo.. It is interesting that in both the Indian and

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the British samples bombard rarely occurs in the (NPo) V NPg

pattern and pepper rarely occurs in (NPa) V NPg. The

construction (NPa) V NPg, is associated with literal uses of

bombard and it is because there are rather more of these in the

Indian samples that this construction is rather more frequent

there.

7. Discussion

This procedure seems to work and to produce coherent results.

Its weaknesses are perhaps that different search engines,

possibly using different ‘relevance’ criteria, are used for

different papers, and that we have conflated material from

different sections of three Indian and two British papers, thus

concealing any variation within the varieties or across

registers or genres. To this extent our results are tentative

and our study is a pilot, the trend of whose results would need

to be confirmed by further study.

Nevertheless the study did produce quite clear, statistically

significant, and partly novel results. As summary Table 7

shows, there do not appear to be absolute differences between

the two samples, but one major and one minor difference in

relative frequencies.

Table 7 Summary of findings

The minor one is that there are usually a few cases of V NPg

NPo in the Indian samples for each verb of fulfilling, while

25

there are very few indeed in the British sample. Nihalani et al.

note the possibility in Indian English of V NPg NPo for present,

provide and supply and of V NPg about NPo for furnish. Our results

confirm that the first construction, though rare, is rather

more frequent in edited Indian Standard English than in the

British equivalent, but we did not find an example of the

second. Nihalani et al. remark that supply NPg NPo is ordinarily

used as a substitute for the pattern supply NPg with NPo (171).

Their intuition that the construction with with is less

frequent in StIndE than in StBrE is correct, even if it is not

supply NPg NPo that is the usual equivalent.

The major difference is that six of the nine verbs show

significant differences in complementation patterns in the same

direction. In all six cases specification of the goal as direct

object and of the thing moved in a with phrase is much more

common in the British sample than in the Indian.

Correspondingly, specification of the thing moved/transferred

as direct object and the goal in a phrase with a preposition is

more frequent in the Indian sample.

However, this does not seem to be because of any general

tendency in Indian English to avoid using with in verb

complementation of this kind. Where there is no alternative

(pepper and bombard) with is used freely. On the other hand

Indian English does seem to tend to use V NPo at/to/on NPg

rather than V NPg with NPo, and this can be seen in all seven

verbs where there is an alternative. British English seems to

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prefer the with construction except for entrust: there is a

significant difference between the varieties except in the case

of this verb. To sum up, it appears that the two varieties

normally use significantly different proportions of the two

constructions, and the difference is in a consistent direction.

This finding is a little surprising, because the V NPo at/to/on

NPg and V NPg with NPo, patterns do not seem to be

interchangeable. From a text-linguistic point of view one could

describe the NPa V NPo to, (etc) NPg patterns as placing NPg in

the information-focus position in the sentence and NPa V NPg

with NPo as placing NPo in this position. From a Cognitive

Grammar point of view one might propose that the choice of

argument structure in this type of verbs involves a subtle

difference in meaning. Such argument structures, which Croft

(1998) calls ”event frames”, are profiled by the verb, combined

in this case with three participants with a particular

assignment of subject, object, and oblique. For the verbs of

fulfilling Croft’s notion of affectedness seems a possible way

of describing the difference. He says that ”full affectedness

by the action appears to be the salient semantic feature for

assignment as object [direct or indirect]”, and a lower degree

of affectedness by the action appears to be the salient

semantic feature for assignment as oblique, the prepositional

objects to NPg and with NPo (Croft, 1998: 88-89), and he points

out that ”some verbs allow a participant to be either the

object or an oblique, with a corresponding difference in

affectedness”. For the pelt verbs it might seem more likely that

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the pelt NPg with NPo structure implies completion (NPg is struck

by NPo) and an instrumental meaning in the prepositional

phrase, while pelt NPo at NPg does not assert that NPo hits NPg

(cf jab at him) and somehow asserts the intrinsicness of NPo to

the pelting. The details of the difference do not matter, the

point is that from several points of view one would expect a

difference.

There is some evidence in our data that some such factors are

operating and the various constructions have different

semantics or functions. First, it is striking that in Indian

English pelt nearly always has stones as its NPo, and at the

same time nearly always has the construction NPa V NPo at/on

NPg. Text-linguistically this is natural, since it means that

stones carries very little new information and it should not be

in focus position. Cognitively it might make sense, if it means

that stones is closely integrated to the meaning of pelt.

Secondly, Table 3 above shows that neither variety has a NPa V

NPo at NPg construction for bombard or pepper. And it is just

bombard and pepper which have the alternative NPo V NPg. One may

speculate that the (NPo) V NPg construction serves a somewhat

similar function to (NPa) V NPo at/to NPg, in that it allows

end–focus or lower affectedness on NPg and a greater degree of

givenness or affectedness on NPo, and hence there is no need

for both constructions. A third piece of evidence that semantic

or functional factors are relevant comes from the observation

that in both the Indian and the British samples bombard more

often occurs in the NPa V NPg (they bombarded the fort) pattern than

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in NPo V NPg (questions bombarded the minister) while the opposite is

true of pepper. A plausible explanation for this is that bombard

is often used in its most basic sense, in which the object

thrown is a bomb or shell, while pepper in this sense is rarely

used to refer to pepper or other spices. Consequently bombard

tends to be used either without a specified object thrown, in

its basic sense (NPa V NPg), or in situations where the object

thrown has high information value particularly for emphasis,

when it is used for “attacking someone by means of questions

and criticisms”, or in a metaphorical sense as in The Americans

bombarded Europe with their paintings (NPa V NPg with NPo). By contrast

pepper usually needs a specified object, but this may be in

focus/low affectedness (NPa V NPg with NPo) or out of focus/in

full control (NPo V NPg).

There is thus some evidence that there are functional or

semantic differences among the constructions as used here. At

first sight Indian newspaper writers tend more frequently to

use argument structures which profile the thing provided (etc)

rather than the person for whom it is provided, while their

British counterparts more often profile the person or goal.

Possibly the functional and semantic factors involved are over-

ruled by characteristic of the linguistic codes. For example,

it might be that the multilingual experience of Indian writers

leads them to transfer some substrate feature. We cannot

comment on this, and, given the typological differences among

the languages involved, it seems unlikely. Alternatively, one

29

may speculate that verb complementation is largely a matter of

analogy (cf Ahulu, 1995:30)6, so that functional and semantic

factors are in fact outweighed by simple forces of convention

and regularization. The analogy of give and throw, which require

NP1 V NP2 to, (etc) NP3, has been stronger in Indian English than

in British. The most likely reason for this greater strength is

random drift: because different analogies are followed,

varieties come to differ, and these two have come to differ in

this way. Conceivably also this is a ‘founding fathers’

(Mufwene 2001) effect, so that the type of English which gave

rise to Indian English two hundred years ago happened to use

fewer NPa V NPg with NPo constructions than the type currently

used in the newspapers examined.

A speculative explanation which accepts that the formal

difference reflects a functional or semantic one would have to

argue that this has to do with different ways of perceiving the

world. Northern European cultures could have been more

influenced by subjectivism, and see the individual as being at

the center of the world, while South Asian cultures might tend

to view the individual as a part or a small object in a larger

whole. If this were so, when offered the choice between two

syntactic structures that focus either on what is provided or

on the recipient to express more or less the same thing, BrE

speakers would be likely to profile the recipient more

frequently in their use of language than their Indian

counterparts do, whereas IndE speakers will be more likely to

use the structure which profiles what is provided rather than

30

the structure where the recipient is profiled. This seems to

make an extraordinarily – some might say disturbingly -- direct

connection between grammar and ‘culture’, and would be very

interesting if corroborative evidence could be found.

We can also continue to recognize the validity of the

functional and semantic factors if we suppose that where such

differences matter the varieties use a different lexical item.

For example, perhaps BrE tends to use throw in some contexts

where StIndE uses pelt and the functional/semantic context calls

for V NPo at NPg . Perhaps StIndE uses give where BrE uses

present and the context calls for NPg to come before NPo. In this

case the verbs we have looked at individually would be merely

aspects of two different systems of verb complementation,

involving sets of interrelated differences.

The conflict between the notion that different constructions

serve different purposes and the evidence that choice of

construction is a varietal feature cries out for explanation,

but we do not have a definitive answer.

8. Conclusion

We can thus answer our research questions as follows:

The method seems to function well. The search engines seem to

have access to a reasonable sample of articles and to provide a

reasonable cross-section of article types. Problems might arise

31

because of bias in the search engines, and future studies might

do well to find ways of using the same search engine for all

the newspapers examined.

There are statistically significant differences between our

Indian and British English samples in the frequencies of

distribution of various constructions in four out of five verbs

of fulfilling, and two verbs of the pelt class that do not

exhibit Levin’s ‘NPa V NPg+with+NPo’ NPo V NPg’ alternation.

In each case where there is a significant difference it is of

the same type and in the same direction, suggesting these are

not idiosyncratic lexical features but evidence for a general

tendency of some kind. In fact they show that structural

nativisation is a systematic process.

As far as we can see, the differences are as likely to occur in

relatively infrequent words like pelt and shower as in frequent

ones like supply and provide.

The Indianness of Indian English and the Britishness of British

English probably come as much from different frequencies of

constructions of this kind as from absolutely different syntax

or local vocabulary, and it would therefore be of considerable

interest to know in which other areas there are significant

differences of frequency.

References

32

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Eugenia Olavarría de Ersson and Philip ShawEnglish Department,University of StockholmS 10691 StockholmSweden

eugeniaolavarria@hotmail.com

Philip.Shaw @English.su.se

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