Personen und Einrichtungen

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In recent usage-based research on World Englishes, a gap has become apparent between major theoretical models, such as those by Kachru (1985) and Schneider (2007), and the increasingly sophisticated statistical models that seek to verify these theories but often fail to do so (see Hundt 2021 for a survey). The present investigation carries this issue to the intersection of World Englishes and grammaticalisation research, with a case study in the domain of habitual aspect. Based on the probabilistic usage profiles of the habitual auxiliary [used to V] (1) and its non-standard variants (2) in 13 varieties that are part of the International Corpus of English (ICE; Greenbaum and Nelson 1996), we conducted a hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis (Levshina 2015).

(1) All those civil servants who used to speak in an impeccable monetarist dialect suddenly changed. (ICE-GB: written)
(2) Will you use to be more authoritative than than Martin and I … [?] (ICE-HK: broadcastDISCS)

This quantitative analysis yields inconclusive, “mixed” results. On the one hand, the generated variety clusters are partly compatible with Kachru’s typology (Inner Circle vs. Outer Circle varieties). On the other hand, they do not consistently align with any of the following three macro-level trends that have been postulated in the literature and that may shape expectations about grammaticalisation patterns in World Englishes: the colonial-lag hypothesis (e.g. Schreier 2019), the hypothesis of contact-induced innovation (e.g. Onysko 2016) and the epicentre hypothesis (e.g. Peters & Bernaisch 2022).

In line with Hundt’s (2021) argument that the discrepancy between theoretical and statistical models derives partly from the fact that they target language structure at different levels of granularity, we qualitatively search for micro-level explanations of the behaviour profiles attested in the individual English varieties. Specifically, we consider properties of habitual aspect in the major contact languages of each L2 English, as they provide concrete potential for structural transfer (e.g. the “tense”-flexible habitual marker 開 in Cantonese as a likely motivation behind the structure given in Example 2 from Hong Kong English). Categorically unique structures such as future-time will use to in Hong Kong English or contracted usen’t in Irish English may be considered indicators of structural nativisation. In the present case study, these unique and non-standard features, however, occur with very low token frequencies, which makes them prone to have little impact on statistical clusters, despite potentially being salient shibboleths for speech-community membership. In other words, such structural features may well be the linguistic reflexes of identity constructions shaping newer Englishes, but they can easily escape probabilistic modelling.

Finally, what the present case study highlights as well is that, although grammaticalisation processes tend to be fairly predictable in the sense of their strong inherent directionality of change, purely synchronic reconstructions of how conservative or innovative a grammatical marker of a given variety is are easily error-prone (e.g. is present-tense use to in Nigerian English a conservative relic and or a reinvention?). This underscores the methodological need for more diachronic/historical corpora for researching post-colonial Englishes (e.g. Brato 2019).