The pragmatics of postcolonial Englishes including backchannels have so far remained in the periphery of academic inquiry. As pragmatic principles may be regarded as culture-sensitive and various cultural differences have been attested between Great Britain and South Asia, the present paper studies backchannels in British, Indian and Sri Lankan English. Drawn from the respective spoken parts of the International Corpus of English, 3,212 backchannels are multifactorially modelled via a conditional inference tree and random forests including recent methodological improvements. Indications of pragmatic nativisation with backchannels are evident in Indian and Sri Lankan English with their distributions and forms in the light of various sociobiographic factors such as age and gender, but also type-token ratio and conversational topic resonate with cultural differences across the speech communities. Lexical echo backchannels only attestable in the South Asian varieties instantiate a creative pragmatic innovation adding to the existing repertoire of backchannels in world Englishes.

中文翻译：

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反向渠道和南亚英语的语用学

迄今为止，包括反向渠道在内的后殖民英语的语用学仍然处于学术探究的边缘。由于语用原则可能被认为是文化敏感的，并且已经证明英国和南亚之间存在各种文化差异，因此本文研究了英国、印度和斯里兰卡英语的反向渠道。从国际英语语料库的各个口语部分中提取，3,212 个反向通道通过条件推理树和随机森林进行多因素建模，包括最近的方法改进。根据年龄和性别等各种社会传记因素，印度和斯里兰卡英语的分布和形式明显表明带有反向渠道的语用本土化的迹象，而且类型标记比率和会话主题也与语言社区的文化差异产生共鸣。仅在南亚品种中可以证明的词汇回声反向通道实例化了一种创造性的实用创新，增加了世界英语中现有的反向通道曲目。