The morphosyntax of varieties of English worldwide: A quantitative perspective

What are the large-scale patterns and generalizations that emerge when investigating morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes from a bird’s eye perspective? To address this question, this study draws on the questionnaire-based morphosyntactic database of the Handbook of Varieties of English, utilizing a number of quantitative analysis techniques (frequency and correlation measures, multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, and principal component analysis). We demonstrate (i) that the database yields a number of generalizations and implicational tendencies relating to vernacular angloversals and universals of New Englishes, (ii) that there is a surprisingly consistent typological division between English L1 vernaculars, on the one hand, and English-based pidgins and creoles on the other hand, and (iii) that World Englishes can, on aggregate, be seen to vary along two major dimensions which we interpret as being indicative of morphosyntactic complexity and analyticity. In conclusion, we offer that the Handbook’s morphosyntactic database presents some interesting methodological challenges to dialectology and dialectometry. # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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