A powerful discourse-pragmatic agent of grammatical change in English since the mid-twentieth century has been the increasing acceptance of colloquialism. Little is known, however, about its influence on grammatical developments in regional varieties of World English other than the two inner circle ‘supervarieties’, British and American English. This paper reports findings from a corpus-based study of three grammatical categories known to be undergoing a colloquialism-related rise in contemporary English, across a range of registers in ten World Englishes: quasi-modals (have to, have got to, be going to, want to), get-passives, and first person plural inclusive let’s. In each case comparisons are drawn with non-colloquial variants: modals (must, should, will, shall), be-passives, and let us. Subsequent functional interpretation of the data is used to explore the effect upon the quantitative patterns identified of the phenomenon of colloquialism and of further factors with which it interacts (including Americanism, prescriptivism, and evolutionary status).
2020. Investigating colloquialization in the British parliamentary record in the late 19th and early 20th century. Language Sciences 79 ► pp. 101270 ff.
2018. Colloquialization versus Densification in Australian English: A Multidimensional Analysis of the Australian Diachronic Hansard Corpus (ADHC). Australian Journal of Linguistics 38:3 ► pp. 293 ff.
Kruger, Haidee, Bertus van Rooy & Adam Smith
2019. Register Change in the British and Australian Hansard (1901-2015). Journal of English Linguistics 47:3 ► pp. 183 ff.
2020. Linguistic Colloquialisation, Democratisation and Gender in Asian Englishes. In Gender in World Englishes, ► pp. 176 ff.
Yang, Yiying & Fan Pan
2023. Informal features in English academic writing: Mismatch between prescriptive advice and actual practice. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 41:2 ► pp. 102 ff.
YAO, XINYUE & PETER COLLINS
2018. Exploring grammatical colloquialisation in non-native English: a case study of Philippine English. English Language and Linguistics 22:3 ► pp. 457 ff.
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