The Hindi complementizer ki in English-dominant bilingual interaction: A corpus-based study

Abstract This paper investigates the use of the Hindi complementizer ki in English‑dominant bilingual interaction among Indian university students. The occurrence of ki is examined across language categories, discourse contexts, recurrent lexical environments and competing clause‑linking strategies using a corpus of collaborative academic discussions. The results show that ki occurs predominantly in English‑dominant discourse and is most frequently associated with cognition and reporting constructions. The findings further indicate that ki occurs within a limited number of recurrent lexical environments and alongside the English complementizer that and zero complementation. More broadly, the study demonstrates how a local grammatical resource remains active within English‑dominant interaction and suggests that language contact may be visible not only in lexical choice but also in patterns of clause linkage and discourse organisation. The paper therefore contributes to research on bilingual discourse, language contact and the role of local grammatical resources in multilingual Englishes.