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Grammatical Change in English World-Wide
Edited by Peter Collins
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 67] 2015
► pp. 15–42

Diachronic variation in the grammar of Australian English

Corpus-based explorations

| University of New South Wales
This chapter uses data extracted from two recently compiled historical corpora of Australian English, the Corpus of Oz Early English (19th century) and AusCorp (20th century) to examine developments in ten morphosyntactic variables over the past two centuries. At the same time comparisons are drawn with British and American English, using data from ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers). While Australian usage is found to have diverged from that of its British colonial parent, reflecting increasing independence from British linguistic norms, it has shifted towards that of American English – the new centre of gravity of grammatical change in English world-wide – which emerges as the most advanced variety on eight of the ten variables. Keywords: grammar; Australian English; diachronic; corpus; variation
Published online: 24 February 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.67.02col
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2021. Diachronic register change. Register Studies 3:1 ► pp. 33 ff. DOI logo
Deshors, Sandra C. & Stefan Th. Gries
2020. Mandative subjunctive versus should in world Englishes: a new take on an old alternation. Corpora 15:2 ► pp. 213 ff. DOI logo
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2019. AusBrown: A new diachronic corpus of Australian English. ICAME Journal 43:1 ► pp. 5 ff. DOI logo
Hundt, Marianne
2018. It is time that this (should) be studied across a broader range of Englishes. In Modeling World Englishes [Varieties of English Around the World, G61], ► pp. 217 ff. DOI logo
Kruger, Haidee & Adam Smith
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