Aspects of Non-finite Verb Complementation in New Zealand English

The present dissertation is an investigation into one of the lesser-studied areas of the English language, that of non-finite verb complementation, as used in one of the lesser-studied native varieties of English, New Zealand English. New Zealand English is the youngest of the world’s main native English dialects, having developed slightly later than its southern hemisphere neighbours, Australian and South African Englishes. Like its neighbours, it is the output of the mixture of British Isles dialects, which, in the case of New Zealand, accompanied the first European settlers to the country during the period of heavy European settlement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This first main settlement period followed the 1840 signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, an agreement which established British sovereignty over New Zealand.

British influence in New Zealand – and other British colonial territories – remained strong throughout the pre-World War II period, whereafter the United States began to exert a cultural influence, both in New Zealand and in other parts of the world. In addition to the external influence dimension, it has been suggested that, as the natural developmental cycle of a postcolonial variety progresses, the people of the young nations begin to reconstruct their collective identity. Products of this identity reconstruction often take the form of innovations within the linguistic system, making analyses of New Zealand English and other such varieties particularly relevant at the present time.

The focus of the present dissertation is on the non-finite complementation patterns of verbs in a selection of areas. The specific areas covered are verbs of prevention and the shifting preferences of two main forms of gerundial complement; matrix predicates selecting the transitive into -ing complement pattern and the nature of innovation in local usage; the predicate pair promise and threaten, their dual roles as subject control and subject-to-subject raising predicates and comparison of the division of labour between the two roles; and the two main non-finite complements of the matrix predicate fear, analysed from the perspective of the recently-postulated Choice Principle. These four areas of study are dealt with in four peer-reviewed articles. Three of the articles incorporate a cross-varietal aspect, with comparison to British and American Englishes, while the focus of the fourth is on New Zealand English only.

The empirical data for all four articles are taken from the genre of newspaper language. The greater part of the data is provided by a purpose-designed diachronic corpus of New Zealand English, which covers the 15-year period between the mid- 1990s and the early 2010s, and the News on the Web corpus, which covers the period from 2010 to the present day. Supplementary data for some of the studies are taken from the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.

The motivation for the study is the fact that, despite a rise in interest in the grammar of New Zealand English following the post-1980s growth in the field of World Englishes, this particular aspect of the grammar is still an under-researched area. With the distinctive phonological and lexical characteristics of New Zealand English having traditionally been the foci of much of the available research attention, the grammar was not considered a viable research aim until relatively recently. The work that has been done in this area since the 1980s, however, has provided important results that highlight the need for further research.

The study sets out with the hypotheses that there are several significant differences to be found between New Zealand English, British English, and American English, that New Zealand English is beginning to show increasingly more independence in the area of non-finite complementation, and that the chosen areas of study can provide results that contribute to the ongoing discussion of ‘colonial lag’. The combined results support these hypotheses, and allow new insight into current effects of the historically strong bilateral influence of the world’s two older varieties alongside the possibility of innovation in the younger variety. The results also provide new theoretical and practical data on a semantic aspect of complement selection in New Zealand English, which can be expanded upon in future research.