4 - Discourse and lexis

Summary

Discourse features in Hong Kong English have not received much attention; for example, Bolton (2002a) includes chapters which deal with phonology (Hung 2000, reprinted in Bolton 2002a), grammar (Gisborne 2000, reprinted in Bolton 2002a) and lexis (Benson 2000, reprinted in Bolton 2002a), but there is no chapter on discourse. Nor is there much discussion in Bolton (2003), Kachru (2005) or Kachru and Nelson (2006), the latter two works looking at the broader context of Asian Englishes. One recent attempt to fill this gap is Wong (2007), which is an analysis of the forms and functions of question tags in the International Corpus of English, Hong Kong component (ICE-HK). Added to this are a number of corpus-based studies which compare the use of English discourse features between Hong Kong speakers and native speakers (Cheng and Warren 2001a, 2001b; Fung and Carter 2007b), but these studies do not presume a distinctive variety of Hong Kong English, generally referring to Hong Kong speakers as non-native speakers (NNS) or students, and their findings are not always consistent with our data. It may be more useful, therefore, to look at the discourse features which Deterding (2007) discusses in relation to Singapore English, as these may be relevant to Hong Kong English, given common substrate influence from Cantonese.

Compared with discourse, there has been more discussion of vocabulary in Hong Kong English; see for example Benson (2000), Bolton (2003), Carless (1995), Chow (2001), Cummings (2007) and Taylor (1989). These studies draw their data from certain genres or kinds of discourse.