1st Edition
Social and Regional Variation in World Englishes Local and Global Perspectives
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.
Table of contents
Foreword
Karen Corrigan
1. English around the Globe: Local and Global Perspectives on Social and Regional Variation
Paula Rautionaho, Hanna Parviainen, Mark Kaunisto, and Arja Nurmi
2. Status or Style? Social and Register Variation in Processes of Linguistic Change in the Past
Terttu Nevalainen
3. Have to vs. have got to in British and Irish English(es)
Markku Filppula
4. Was/were Variation with Subject Pronouns We, You, and They in Recent British English – Towards Standard Uses?
Paula Rautionaho and Mark Kaunisto
5. Regional Syntactic Variability in the Complementation System of Global Varieties of English
Raquel Romasanta
6. The Processes of Preposition Omission across English Variety Types
Heli Paulasto and Lea Meriläinen
7. Colonial Lag or Feature Retention in Postcolonial Varieties of English: The Negative
Scalar Conjunction ‘and that too’ in South Asian Englishes and Beyond
Robert Fuchs
8. My Bad – The Rise of an Innovative Structure through the Media
Patricia Ronan
9. Big and Rich Social Networks in Computational Sociolinguistics
Mikko Laitinen and Masoud Fatemi
10. Rhythm in World Englishes – Evidence from a Quantitative Analysis of Co-occurrence Patterns in a Corpus of L1 and L2 Varieties of English
Sebastian Hoffmann, Sabine Arndt-Lappe, and Peter Uhrig
Index
List of contributors
Sabine Arndt-Lappe is Professor of English linguistics at Trier University, Germany.
Karen Corrigan is Director of Research in Linguistics at Newcastle University, United Kingdom.
Masoud Fatemi is Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Linnaeus University, Sweden, and the
University of Eastern Finland.
Markku Filppula is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Eastern Finland.
Robert Fuchs is Associate Professor in English linguistics at the University of Hamburg, Germany.
Sebastian Hoffmann is Professor of English Linguistics at Trier University, Germany.
Mark Kaunisto is Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at Tampere University, Finland.
Mikko Laitinen is Professor of English Language at the University of Eastern Finland.
Lea Meriläinen is Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of Eastern Finland.
Terttu Nevalainen is Professor Emerita of English Philology at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Arja Nurmi is a Senior Lecturer of English Translation at Tampere University, Finland.
Hanna Parviainen is University Teacher at Tampere University, Finland.
Heli Paulasto is Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of Eastern Finland.
Paula Rautionaho is University Researcher at the University of Eastern Finland.
Raquel P. Romasanta is Post-doctoral Researcher at the University of Vigo, Spain.
Patricia Ronan is Professor of English Linguistics at TU Dortmund University, Germany.
Peter Uhrig is Post-doctoral Researcher at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.
Biography
Paula Rautionaho is University Researcher at the University of Eastern Finland.
Hanna Parviainen is University Teacher at Tampere University, Finland.
Mark Kaunisto is Senior Lecturer in English Linguistics at Tampere University, Finland.
Arja Nurmi is a Senior Lecturer of English Translation at Tampere University, Finland.
'The volume comprises a topically diverse range of contributions. In addition to the unifying focus on variation and World Englishes, however, all chapters follow a corpus-based, empirical methodology, giving coherence to the book despite its breadth of topics.'
Axel Bohmann, Universitat Freiburg
