Using automatically parsed corpora to discover lexico-grammatical features of English varieties

Abstract

We employ syntactic parsing to describe and to discover lexico-grammatical features of English regional varieties. In the absence of suitable Treebanks, automatically parsed corpora (tree jungles) can be used. As an example we focus on Indian English, using the International Corpus of English (ICE), and the British National Corpus (BNC). We use a largely corpus-driven method. There are few differences in frequencies of syntactic relations between the corpora, but considerable differences when taking the intricate relations between grammar and lexis into account. We describe differences in the use of zero articles, verb-preposition constructions, and ditransitive verbs. We show that relatively small corpora can be used to discover subtle lexico-grammatical differences.