Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

156 Language Planning and Education
4. Modal verbs:
Use of the modal could where British English might prefer be able to (e.g. He
could do well in his exams because he studied hard).
5. Miscellaneous:
For example, use of the locative adverbial there where British English speakers
would prefer an existential construction (e.g. What do you want to drink? Coffee
is there, tea is there, beer is there).
6.2.1.3 Lexis
The lexicon is where acculturation, indigenisation and innovation have produced
the most obvious differences from British or American English, and where the
distinctiveness of Asian and African New Englishes is most abundantly signalled.
The linguistic processes involved are borrowing, hybridisation and semantic
extension or restriction.
In the case of borrowing, we are talking primarily of single lexical items borrowed
from Malay, Chinese, Hindi or any one of a large number of Indian languages to
refer to local cultural artefacts or concepts. While some have been assimilated into
British and American English, appearing in authoritative dictionaries such as the
OED (e.g. cheroot, pariah, pukka), the majority have not and thus, though widely
used in India or Singapore, would be unfamiliar to British and American speakers:
for example, jaga, padang, makan, kampong from Singapore English; and bindi,
chota, lathi, swadeshi from Indian English. 3
A second category of innovative lexis consists of hybridised items formed by the
combination of two or more elements from distinct languages. Examples from
Indian English would include lathi charge (baton charge) or bindi mark (mark on
forehead) as well as hybrid collocations such as satyagraha movement (insistence on
truth movement).
Finally, there are those English lexical items that have undergone semantic
extension or restriction. For example, in Singapore English one finds deep used in an
extended sense to mean ‘educated’ or ‘formal’ as in my father speak the deep Hokkien;
and last time used with the meaning of ‘previously’, as in last time they had a lot of
monkeys in the Botanic gardens. And in Indian English one encounters such innovative
usages as eating-leaves, referring to the banana leaves on which food may be
served.
Also worthy of notice under the heading of lexis are novel collocations, for
instance yellow journalist, attested in Indian English; innovative idioms (e.g. to be on
tarmac from East African English, meaning currently unemployed but looking for a
job (Jenkins 2003: 27)); and the use, especially in Indian English, of formal, even
archaic, vocabulary where British or American users might prefer more informal,
colloquial items.
Beyond the level of the sentence, meanwhile, there are distinctive discoursal
phenomena. These include: the different lexico-grammatical realisations of particular
speech acts (e.g. offering thanks), differences in genre structure and content