Between simplification and complexification: non-standard varieties of English around the world

In this talk we will report on recent and ongoing research on large-scale morphosyntactic variation in non-standard varieties of English. Our empirical basis will be what may be called the ‘World Atlas of Morphosyntactic Variation in English’, which is an outgrowth of the largest comparative study (Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi 2004) to date of entire grammatical subsystems of varieties of English worldwide. A catalogue of 76 morphosyntactic features taken from 11 core areas of English morphosyntax was investigated for 46 (groups of) non-standard varieties of English around the world, including 20 L1 varieties, 11 L2 varieties, and 15 Pidgins and Creoles from all seven anglophone world regions (the British Isles, the Americas, the Caribbean, the Pacific Archipelagos, Australasia, Africa, South and Southeast Asia). We will show that the varieties of English can be thought of as varying along two major morphosyntactic dimensions: analyticity and complexity. We will discuss this variance, along with Greenbergian-type indices of inflectional complexity (Greenberg 1960) derived from naturalistic corpus data, in light of (a) the various complexity notions currently debated in the literature (notably Dahl 2004, McWhorter 2001, Hawkins 2004), and (b) Trudgill's suggestion (forthcoming) that in varieties of English simplification is to be found in high-contact varieties while complexification is characteristic of low-contact varieties, i.e. traditional L1 dialects in the British Isles and North America.