In previous studies on contact varieties of English, a number of shared features have been claimed. The present study presents a corpus-based investigation of two of these features, subject-verb concord and interrogative constructions. By comparing ICE-corpora from Great Britain, New Zealand, India, Kenya, Jamaica, Singapore as well as two smaller corpora from Northern Ireland, the possible roles of substrate influence and more general language contact phenomena are investigated in a systematic way. Corpus evidence suggests that there is indeed a qualitative difference between contact and non-contact varieties due to typological and SLA trends.