Abstract
Over the past two and a half decades, comparable corpora of national standard varieties have greatly advanced the synchronic study of English world-wide (e.g., Hundt & Gut 2012). At the same time, theoretical accounts of postcolonial Englishes (Schneider 2007) explicitly relate a variety’s status to its sociolinguistic history. Thus, from the perspective of World Englishes, a robust base for diachronic corpus analysis is desirable in addition to the available synchronic resources.
Grammatical Change in English World-Wide, edited by Peter Collins, addresses this need by bringing together diachronic corpus research on different national varieties of English. The volume is a showcase of ongoing efforts at expanding the range of resources available for the study of new Englishes, and many of the authors are the compilers of such new corpora (e.g., AusCorp for twentieth-century Australian English, compiled by Yao and Collins; the Corpus of Early New Zealand English, CENZE, compiled by Hundt; the South Asian Varieties of English Corpus, SAVE, compiled by Bernaisch, Mukherjee, and colleagues). The book’s focus is predominantly on broadening the historical and geographic scope of established questions, rather than on developing new theoretical or methodological approaches. Hence, most contributions are accessible to readers with a general understanding of linguistics and quantitative analysis, but particularly those with some background in corpus linguistics.
Framed by a short introduction by the editor, the volume comprises two sections, distinguishing between studies of Inner and Outer Circle varieties of English (Kachru 1992 [1985]). The geographic range of the contributions spans thirteen individual varieties from five continents. Most authors focus on core grammatical developments, such as the rise in frequency of the progressive (Kirk; Collins’s chapter on Philippine English; Fuchs & Gut; van Rooy & Piotrowska), the modal system (Mair; van Hattum; Noël & van der Auwera), or the historical development of do-support in negative and interrogative clauses (D’Arcy; Hundt). A smaller number of studies is situated on the fringe of grammatical change proper, such as the quotative system (Davydova) or cultural keyword analysis (Mukherjee & Bernaisch). Most chapters cover the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but some are restricted to very recent developments (e.g., Davydova) or diachronic conclusions based on apparent-time data (Fuchs & Gut). In terms of methods, descriptive statistics feature most prominently, but five studies also incorporate inferential approaches (Rodríguez Louro; Yao; De Clerck & Vanopstal; Davydova; Fuchs & Gut). In total, the contributions are well suited to provide an overview of questions, methods, and contexts for the study of grammatical change in the new Englishes.
Collins’s opening chapter compares eight variables in Australian English (AusE), British English (BrE), and American English (AmE) between 1800 and 2000. The short analyses in this chapter sketch the terrain for the more micro-level studies that follow. The method exemplified by Collins—comparing frequency developments in the variety under investigation against baselines from BrE and/or AmE—is the approach favored by most contributions in the volume. Within the section on Inner Circle varieties, Marianne Hundt, John M. Kirk, Pam Peters, Marije van Hattum, and Xinyue Yao all follow such a comparative methodology. While the chapters on the antipodean varieties (Hundt; Peters; Yao) document trajectories of change that either proceed in parallel with the two supervarieties or lag behind them, Irish English emerges as a historical leader both in the development of the progressive (Kirk) and in the gradual loss of the possibility to signal past time reference with might (van Hattum). Since these latter two studies present similar findings and theoretical implications, it would have been helpful to see them put into conversation, either through cross-references or a separate commentary.
Christian Mair’s paper on the modal system in twentieth-century BrE and AmE is in large part a methodological reflection on the kind of comparative corpus research conducted in the aforementioned chapters. Mair demonstrates the diachronic irrelevance of apparently significant synchronic differences as well as the confounding influence of different text types on observed frequency patterns. The author makes a strong case for expanding the diachronic corpus database for research into the new Englishes and cautions against over-interpreting synchronic results. The paper gives theoretical motivation to the research represented in the volume and provides a critical backdrop against which to read other contributions. It would consequently have been ideally suited as an opening chapter; its place in the middle of the Inner Circle section is a bit unfortunate and owed to the purely alphabetical order of contributions in each section.
The remaining three studies in the Inner Circle section (D’Arcy; Meyer; Rodríguez Louro) focus more closely on internal developments in one variety. Alexandra D’Arcy considers grammatical developments in the Canadian region of Victoria. Transatlantic differences in variation between have and have got are explained by intersecting diachronic developments. The relatively narrow geographic scope of her study allows D’Arcy to consider linguistic developments in conjunction with demographic patterns over roughly eighty years, adding a dimension that is absent from most of the other contributions. Mathias L. G. Meyer gives a structural account of different passivization strategies for ditransitive constructions in Canadian English from the nineteenth century to the present. The chapter is detailed, but more interested in internal processes in English at large than in any particular variety or relationships among different varieties. Hence, Meyer’s contribution remains tangential to the volume’s topical focus.
Celeste Rodríguez Louro traces the evolution of the verb think into an epistemic marker in AusE, with attendant restructuring of grammatical constraints. Variable rule analysis allows her to establish differential influence of a number of linguistic factors. However, it is not clear why the author conducts separate statistical analyses for four historical periods, rather than treating time period as a factor in one unified analysis. A similar choice is made by Yao in her study of the present perfect and preterite in AusE, BrE, and AmE, in which she presents individual analyses for each combination of variety and time period. This method excludes the two main foci of the volume, diachronic change and geographic variation, from direct statistical modeling. Conclusions can still be drawn from comparing the different analyses, but they lack the statistical rigor that is accorded the internal linguistic factors.
The section on Outer Circle varieties begins with another chapter by Collins, which discusses recent changes in the progressive in AmE, BrE, and Philippine English on the basis of the Brown family’s core corpora (Brown, LOB, Frown, F-LOB) and parallel extensions for the Philippines. As in the previous section, the comparative corpus approach is taken by a number of additional authors. Bernard De Clerck and Klaar Vanopstal compare verbal past regularization (e.g., kneeled instead of knelt as a past inflectional form of kneel) in BrE, AmE, and Indian English (IndE) and find internal linguistic constraints to be more reliable predictors of variation than geography. Stephanie Hackert and Dagmar Deuber test the purported Americanization of news writing in Trinidadian and Bahamian English. While influence of AmE does emerge as a potential factor for some of the features they examine (contractions, passives, relativization, and pseudotitles), the overall conservatism of Caribbean press texts remains the clearest finding. Also focusing on developments in news writing, Dirk Noël and Johan van der Auwera extend the discussion of the modal system (see Mair’s chapter) to Hong Kong English (HKE). They find strong genre coherence within BrE, AmE and HKE, and trace a development that sees HKE following a British model.
Two chapters in the Outer Circle section employ a clearly variationist sociolinguistic approach. Julia Davydova analyzes the quotative system in a sociolinguistic corpus of IndE spanning the period of 2007 to 2011. She finds that core members of the system (e.g., say) are relatively stable in micro-diachrony, but local innovations (e.g., okay) and global newcomers (e.g., be like) experience rapid change. Robert Fuchs and Ulrike Gut document the influence of speaker age (along ethnicity and situation- or text-specific factors) on frequency of the progressive in Nigerian English, allowing for the apparent-time conclusion that the construction is spreading. These studies demonstrate two positive trends in current corpus linguistics: a) the utilization of increasingly sophisticated statistical methods, and b) a growing rapprochement with sociolinguistics, resulting in the incorporation of demographic information in corpus design and analysis.
Yet another innovative methodological angle is taken by Joybrato Mukherjee and Tobias Bernaisch. The authors investigate patterns of collocation for different cultural keywords (government, terror) in South Asian newspapers. While their approach broadens the range of the volume, the results appear to be more relevant from a sociocultural than a grammatical perspective. This makes the contribution a topical outlier, but one that many readers will appreciate nonetheless, given the importance of sociocultural forces in postcolonial Englishes (cf. Schneider 2007).
The volume concludes with Bertus van Rooy and Caroline Piotrowska’s investigation of different progressive constructions over the course of Black South African English’s (BSAfE) relatively young history. Their most important finding is that frequencies have remained stable throughout the time period covered (1884-2012), pointing to substrate influence from Bantu languages that has existed ever since the emergence of BSAfE.
Taken together, the selection of contributions accurately represents the current state of diachronic corpus research on the grammar of English world-wide. Not least among the volume’s benefits is the fact that Collins brings together many of the researchers involved in compiling the most recent corpora designed for comparison of grammatical processes across time and locales. In terms of methods, the book does not aim for setting new standards, but contributions such as those by Davydova or Fuchs & Gut nonetheless mark a step forward from the purely descriptive statistics found elsewhere. The only missed opportunity in my eyes is a lack of explicit connections drawn between individual chapters. It would have been helpful to establish and explore common themes in separate commentary sections, or to choose a theoretically motivated grouping of papers beyond the basic (and controversial, cf. Pennycook 2007) Inner and Outer Circle distinction. Different methodological angles or patterns of cross-varietal difference would have lent themselves as organizing principles to structure the book.
These minor shortcomings notwithstanding, Grammatical Change in English World-Wide is a valuable and timely collection of papers representing the increased diachronic and cross-varietal reach of English comparative corpus linguistics. Researchers in the fields of grammatical change and World Englishes will benefit greatly from reading this volume, as will students with an interest in linguistic variation in the English-speaking world.