Table Of ContentEugene Green and Charles F. Meyer (Eds.)
The Variability of Current World Englishes
Topics in English Linguistics
Edited by
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Bernd Kortmann
Volume 87.1
The Variability of
Current World Englishes
Edited by
Eugene Green and Charles F. Meyer
ISBN 978-3-11-033967-3
e-ISBN 978-3-11-035210-8
ISSN 1434-3452
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A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
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Foreword
Seven chapters in this book had their first audiences at the second meeting of the
International Society for the Linguistics of English, June 17–21, 2011, in Boston,
Massachusetts. These chapters, together with two others, those by Charles F.
Meyer and Eugene Green, who together with other New England colleagues
organized the meeting, offer a first collection of ISLE’s studies. Our hope is
that subsequent meetings will bring to publication representative chapters of
scholarly research under the aegis of ISLE. We gladly acknowledge, as part of
the enterprise in gathering the chapters included, the support of ISLE’s mem-
bership who voted to come to Boston University for the 2011 meeting, contrib-
uted to its spirited success, and advised us discerningly on ways to shape the
book’s structure. In particular, we thank ISLE 2’s organizers: Daniel D onoghue,
Harvard University, Bruce Fraser, Boston University, Stephen Harris, Uni-
versity of Massachusetts at Amherst, Geoffrey Russom, Brown University,
Margaret Thomas, Boston College, and Maria Zlateva, Boston University.
Elizabeth Traugott was of indispensable assistance from first to last in advis-
ing us on arranging the conference and bringing this book to publication. Much
of the book’s strength is due to her, none of its frailties. We thank our wives,
Elizabeth Fay and Rosemary Green, for their patient and timely support.
Acknowledgements
Contents¹
Foreword — v
Eugene Green and Charles F. Meyer*
Introduction — 1
Part 1
Methodological issues in distinguishing varieties
Caroline R. Wiltshire
New Englishes and the emergence of the unmarked — 13
Kirk Hazen
Methodological choices in language variation analysis — 41
Christian Mair
Globalisation and the transnational impact of non-standard varieties — 65
Gerald Nelson
The circle of English:
an exploration of the “core” and “periphery” of world Englishes — 99
Part 2
Studies of features in particular contexts
Rajend Mesthrie
A robust, living substratum: contact and sociolinguistic factors in the
evolution of a variety of Black English in Kimberley, South Africa — 127
Zhiming Bao
Got in Singapore English — 147
* The editors have written a set of contextual statements, one each placed after a chapter.
viii Contents
Lars Hinrichs
Diasporic mixing of World Englishes:
the case of Jamaican Creole in Toronto — 169
Sali A. Tagliamonte
System and society in the evolution of change: the view from Canada — 199
Charles F. Meyer
A diachronic study of pseudo-titles and related appositives
in the press reportage of British and American newspapers — 239
Eugene Green
The Diffusion of I need you to + infinitive in world Englishes — 257
Index — 285
Contents
Eugene Green and Charles F. Meyer
Introduction
1 Perspectives
In a discussion of his notion of world language systems, de Swaan (2010: 57)
characterizes English as a “hypercentral language… that connects the supercen-
tral languages with one another and therefore constitutes the pivot of the world
language system.” English has achieved this status, he continues, because “of
the many multilinguals who have it in their repertoire” (72). But as English has
spread worldwide, the “repertoire” that speakers possess has become increas-
ingly heterogeneous, largely because of the many contexts in which English is
now used: not just in schools, businesses, or social interactions but in chat rooms
on the internet as well as through social media such as Twitter, which draw users
of English from around the world with many different linguistic backgrounds
and varying levels of fluency in English.
Within linguistics, language variation has had varying interpretations.
Chomsky (1995) proposed the notion of ‘parametric variation’ to explain sys-
tematic differences between languages, for instance some languages permitting
null subjects and others not. For instance, while subject pronouns are obligatory
in English, in Italian they are optional:
English Italian
She is ill. Lei è malata.
*is ill. È malata. (Haegeman 1991: 19)
Thus, a child acquiring English will set the null subject parameter to “off,” while
a child acquiring Italian would set it to “on.”
Because this type of variation is restricted to Chomsky’s notion of universal
grammar, it has not had much appeal to individuals studying variation in world
Englishes. Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008: 169) do note that “there is great potential
value in the parameter-setting model since it adopts a unified approach to dif-
ferent facets of interlanguage grammar.” In support of this claim, they review a
study by Mesthrie (1992: 167–174) that shows how over a period of time, speakers
of a pre-basilectal variety of Indian English switched the null-subject parameter
from a dominant null subject norm to a dominant full subject norm. That is,
while both null and full subject forms co-existed, over time full subjects became
2 Eugene Green and Charles F. Meyer
predominant. Other researchers too (including two who have written chapters in
this book) have explored how facets of language acquisition have influenced the
development of new Englishes. Overall, though, the study of variation in world
Englishes has been conducted primarily by social variationists.
And the contributions made by sociolinguists have been many. Bolton (2003:
42–43) lists eleven different approaches to the study of world Englishes, nine
of which fall within the field of Sociolinguistics. Although not all of the socio-
linguistic approaches he cites are of equal importance (Schneider 2007: 11–12),
many stand out as particularly significant, such as Kachru’s (1985) work on the
concentric circles of English (inner, outer, and expanding); studies of pidgins
and creoles that link the development of New Englishes to the processes of pid-
ginization and creolization; efforts in the area of Applied Linguistics to address
the educational implications of the development of World Englishes; analyses
employing the methodologies of dialectology and the study of social variation;
and “Popularisers” such as David Crystal, who describe World Englishes for a
general mass audience.
Bolton (2003) also mentions two approaches outside Sociolinguistics: tradi-
tional research on the English language, as in Quirk and Widdowson (1985), that
provides descriptive and historical information about World Englishes, and
studies in the area of “English corpus linguistics” that are based on the analysis
of electronic corpora containing samples of world Englishes. Although Bolton ex -
cludes corpus-based research from the area of sociolinguistic-based approaches,
since the publication of his book many sociolinguists have begun creating and
analyzing linguistic corpora. For instance, Kretzschmar et al. (2006) describe a
number of efforts to create corpora that will permit the study of regional and
social language variation. Moreover, there are corpora available that are specifi-
cally designed to study world Englishes, such as the International Corpus of
English (ICE, http://ice-corpora.net/ICE/INDEX.HTM) and the Corpus of Global
Web-Based English (GloWbE, http://corpus2.byu.edu/glowbe/). These two
corpora, plus others, were used as the basis of many of the chapters in this book.
It is worth noting too that many linguists in allied disciplines have interests
similar to those conducting sociolinguistic research. Van Rooy (2010: 4) adds that
joining sociolinguists in the study of language variation are “a number of theo-
retical approaches to syntax and grammar [that] are clustered together under
the rubric of usage-based theorists.” These approaches draw upon current work
in such areas as cognitive grammar (Langacker 2008) and functional grammar
(Halliday and Matthiessen 2013) – theories based on language usage rather than
introspection.
The ten chapters in The Variability of Current World Englishes draw upon
research in world Englishes to explore issues of language variation in a range of
