Colloquialization across World Englishes: Some Preliminary Findings from a Corpus Analysis

Recent research on grammatical change has identified colloquialization as one of the major trends in contemporary English This paper examines the relative distribution and frequency of four phenomena attributed to colloquialization in different varieties of English: the rise in the use of contractions, semi-modals, and get-passives and the decline in the use of which-relatives. Through a quantitative corpus-based analysis, the paper explores whether a general cross-varietal pattern can be discerned in the development of colloquialization in an effort to gain further understanding on the dynamics between Inner, Outer, and Expanding Gircles of English. While the statistical findings of the investigation reveal some consistent variational patterns, definitive conclusions are deferred pending further qualitative analysis.