One of the greatest Indian ornithologist: A corpus-based study of number variation in partitives in regional Indian newspaper Englishes

Indian English (IndE) has been shown to exhibit a range of variety-specific syntactic features. The use of partitive constructions, however, has not yet received a lot of scholarly attention. The present paper therefore investigates number variation in partitives, limiting its focus to one/two/many of the N (e.g. one of the birds vs. one of the birdø) in IndE. Using data from the Corpus of Regional Indian Newspaper Englishes, we analyse the influence of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors on the choice of singular vs. plural nouns. The findings of our multifactorial analyses indicate that, while plural marking is the dominant pattern in the investigated register, singular forms can be attested to varying degrees across different regions, with the regional provenance of texts as the strongest predictor. Other key factors include, for example, the type of the preceding quantifier as well as the distance between one/two/many and the embedded noun. The results suggest the potential gradual evolvement of regional preferences within IndE and thus provide an important contribution to the academic discourse on grammatical variation in the variety.