Social and Regional Variation in World Englishes: Local and Global Perspectives

Description

This collection charts the evolution of grammatical variation in Englishes from Late Middle English to the present, using corpus linguistic tools to address divergence and convergence in local and global perspectives. The book considers both diachronic and synchronic perspectives in grammatical variation across varieties of English across the UK, North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The volume reflects on the questions of whether patterns of variation diverge or converge and to what extent catalysts for change are shared in time and space. Chapters look at different factors in grammatical variation at both the macro and micro level, investigating specific linguistic and grammatical features but also at wider phenomena in contact linguistics, social patterns, social networks, and media-based corpora. Chapters progress from the local to the global, all with an eye towards using the latest methodological approaches from corpus linguistics to shed light on the affordances of data-informed methods to study grammatical change and the possibilities for future research. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and World Englishes. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Contributors Foreword Acknowledgements Chapter 1 English around the globe: Local and global perspectives on social and regional variation Chapter 2 Status or style?: Social and register variation in processes of linguistic change in the past Chapter 3 Have to vs. have got to in British and Irish English(es) Chapter 4 Was/were variation with subject pronouns we, you, and they in recent British English: Towards standard uses? Chapter 5 Regional syntactic variability in the complementation system of global varieties of English Chapter 6 The processes of preposition omission across English variety types Chapter 7 Colonial lag or feature retention in postcolonial varieties of English: The negative scalar conjunction “and that too” in South Asian Englishes and beyond Chapter 8 My bad: The rise of an innovative structure through the media Chapter 9 Big and rich social networks in computational sociolinguistics Chapter 10 Rhythm in World Englishes: Evidence from a quantitative analysis of co-occurrence patterns in a corpus of L1 and L2 varieties of English Index